Design & Circular Economy (TSB keynote)

This was posted on slideshare. This was written by Frank Oconnor in November, 2013.

http://www.slideshare.net/EcodesignCentreWales/design-circular-economy-tsb-keynote

Design & Circular Economy (TSB keynote)Presentation Transcript

• 1. good  design  and  the  circular  economy          @frank_oconnor  Director  @ecodesigncentre     !  
• 2. to  believe  in  something,  and  not  to  live  it,    is  dishonest.    Mahatma  Gandhi  
• 3.  we  live  in  a  throwaway  society  Image www.castlereagh.gov.uk    …………  but  there  is  no  away    
• 4. every design choice has a consequencebad design is a crime image  source:    Chris  Jordan  
• 5.    98%  of  products  are        thrown  away  within        6  months   source:    Edwin  Datschefski  &  United   NaKons  University   source: ads-ngo.com
• 6. 80%of environmentalimpactscan be locked-in atthe design stage
• 7. designers interactbetween industry, usersand other actors industry design consumers
• 8. designers can influencehow people consume,use, behave … industry design consumers
• 9. !our mission is to make good design happen
• 10. image  source:  Fuse  /  GeNy  
• 11. the  single  biggest  problem  in  communicaKon  is  the  illusion  that  it  has  taken  place      George  Bernard  Shaw        
• 12. source:  Nathan  Halle6  
• 13. image  source:  jubbling.com  
• 14. source: ZIPcars
• 15. source:  Apple    
• 16.  neodymium    car  speaker   source: Harman & wiki
• 17.  polluKon    true  cost    source: hybridcars.com
• 18.  toxicity,  health    true  cost    source: dailymail.co.uk
• 19.  recovery    true  cost   source: retrench.co.uk
• 20. low  carbon  /  high  on     criKcal  materials   source: mywindpowersystem.com
• 21. NOMAGIC MATERIALS
• 22. way  forward?  
• 23. 1   Cradle to Cradle “remake the way we make things” thinking about the materials we use, how our products are designed and assembled, and their cycles of use with our customers. No matter how good your products are, there comes a time when their first useful life comes to an end. In considering product life cycles Cradle to Cradle asks us to re-think the commonplace approach of “take, make & waste” and this prompted us to act. During the early stages of the design of Ara we established a relationship with one of Cradle to Cradle’s authors, renowned industrial chemist Micheal Braungart. Throughout the development we have been working with EPEA, Micheal’s C2C organisation based in Hamburg. We’ve always very carefully considered the materials that we use in our products but our aim in working with EPEA is to ensure that what we’re using is truly safe, for humans and the environment alike, and successful in technical cycles of reuse. This means looking in much more detail at every chemical disassembly tested it like mad. other plastic bases ours is 100% recyclable. And rest assured we a base without a collar insert. A simple point but unlike almost Smart design and careful material selection has enabled us to cre difficult to remove. not so great when you come to recycle it, as the collar can be ver the base. Great for not dragging your chair across the carpet but collar moulded into the plastic to stop the gas lift creeping throug sense they are, and with very few exceptions they all have a m plastic chair bases are pretty much the same, aren’t they? Well in ourselves the question - some look much better than others but Not the most complicated part on a task chair, granted, but we as recyclable. Do something really simple; make the chair base 100% we’ve ever made. armrest that’s robust, easy to use and probably the most comforta with a separate insert made from recycled foam. The result is more effectively. The traditional PU is replaced by a flexible polym than ever, using materials that could be segregated easily and recyc Our goal was to design a new arm pad that was more comforta Arm support that’s there only when you need it. controls that are easy to operate and labelled clearly. tuned and balanced to your precise needs, using adjustment smart engineering inside the mechanism means the ride can be We know that people come in all shapes and sizes. That’s why ingredient in the materials we use; to determine which inhibit this aim and need to be substituted or remove as a result. end of life Returning your ARA at ‘End of Life’ cradle to cradle Cradle to Cradle is an approach to design which looks to make us truly environmentally effective, by developing products for closed loop systems in which all the materials used are safe and beneficial - either to biodegrade naturally or to be fully recycled into high quality materials for subsequent product generations, again and again. In order for us to maximise the value of the materials used in your chair we’d like to get them back once you’ve finished with them. It’s pretty simple, all you need to do is visit our website at www.orangebox.com/endoflife.htm
• 24. 2   30% part reduction 30% faster assembly 37% weight dematerialisation
• 25. local eol dematerialise
• 26. 20 kg 15 kg
• 27. 1   ! mindset  changes     think  ‘resource’  instead  of  ‘waste’     think  ‘need’,  ‘use’  instead  of  ‘consume’     transform  ‘stuff’,  don’t  destroy  it     think  people,  think  ‘share’     ensure  you  are  contribuCng,  relevant    
• 28. 2   ! circular  economy  consideraKons     consideraCon  of  full  life  cycles  /  system     consideraCon  of  all  ‘sustainability’  issues  /  focus  on   greatest  impact     no  shiF  of  pressure  between  stages  of  life  cycle  /   true  cost     creaCon  of  goods  and  services  with  higher  overall   quality  and  value  /  transformaCve  use  cycles     embrace  new  models  of  business  &  ownership  
• 29. 3   ! good  design  criteria     long-­‐life     non-­‐toxic       localise     renewable  energy  
• 30. ! designed,  made,  remade.  zero  waste.   only  resource   passport  source:  Habufa  
• 31. !a  world  where  good  design  is  the  norm  
• 32. thanks.  good  luck.        ecodesigncentre.org  edcshare.org  @ecodesigncentre    @frank_oconnor         

Design for circular economy must consider disruptive technologies

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/design-circular-economy-disruptive-technology 
This is an article that was first published by 
Chris Sherwin
theguardian.com, Tuesday 12 November 2013 13.57 GMT

Design for circular economy must consider disruptive technologies

While nuts and bolts are important, circular designs may not be created by engineers and designers, but by technologists, digital entrepreneurs and innovators

There are risks in getting designers to focus on the nuts and bolts of current products, rather than on disruptive technologies that can supersede them. Photograph: Alan Kaplanas/Corbis

A decade or so ago, I worked on green and sustainable product design. I spent much of that time dismantling products like video cassette recorders (VCR's) to reduce materials, improve their energy use, eliminate hazardous substance use and make them easier to disassemble.

A few years down the line and our focus had shifted to dismantling DVD players and recorders which had superseded VCR's. We used essentially the same processes to tackle similar design challenges like energy and material use, product disassembly and toxicity.

Fast-forward 10 years and what has happened is the dematerialisation of entertainment content through new digital and information technologies and business models like Netflix, LoveFilm and on-demand TV.

Beyond teardown

A lot of design for the circular economy is based on disassembly projects, generically termed as teardowns. You can learn a lot from taking an in-depth look at the mechanics and technicalities of how a product is put together. It can unquestionably help make portfolios more circular, easier to disassemble and recycle, more resource efficient and minimise its hazardous substances and environmental footprint – all valuable stuff.

However, do these tools and methods adequately prepare us for an ecologically and economically sustainable future? There are risks in getting designers to focus, quite literally, on the nuts and bolts of current products, rather than on the disruptive technologies that can supersede them. It may distract us from systemic product-system redesign, and circular economy designers need to track the seismic technological shifts that disrupt what we do today.

Keeping on top of what customers really want

In some ways, dismantling video cassette recorders and DVD players all those years ago is an early exemplar of the circular economy principle of 'starting with the end in mind' - feeding learning from end of life product disassembly into early-stage product design. But it's important to have the right end in mind. Ultimately, it was the 'result', function, utility, service or benefit that consumers were looking for to enjoy movie and TV content on-demand.

This is now satisfied in completely new ways, increasingly through digital technology or new services that render old solutions obsolete. The design question then becomes what is the best and greenest way to deliver against these needs. It will be important to ensure new technologies or solutions have sustainability maximised and built-in. Studies have suggested the switch from physical (CD's) to digital entertainment content (MP3's) can reduce environmental impacts by 40-80% (PDF). Downloading movies however can have a higher carbon footprint than posting DVD's, based on the efficiencies of servers and IT systems, so there is still a job to ensure dematerialised products and new solutions actually deliver waste savings and circularity across the entire system from the outset.

Circular designers need to develop functionality and service-based thinking, as well as knowing about products, technology and material science, and we should never lose sight that in the end, almost all products are designed for people and their needs.

A toolkit for circular design

Our toolkit for circular design will certainly need good mechanical design skills; plus will undoubtedly feature a better understanding of the fundamental chemistry that makes up product components, as advocated by many circular economy and cradle-to-cradle practitioners.

However, many winning circular designs may not be created on the tables or labs of engineers and designers dismantling existing kit; they may come from a new entrant, or a fleet of-foot technologists, digital entrepreneurs and innovators that gate-crash a category or industry; or else they may come from smart marketers who spot and understand their customers needs and deliver breakthrough solutions to satisfy them.

We need new circular models of commerce that design-out waste, material and resource problems from the get-go, in just the way digital and service innovation has revolutionised home entertainments. As a result, the circular economy will become the front-end design and innovation issue that it clearly merits. In the rush to get to grips with the end-of-life issues from current products, circular design must not miss new technology and new needs as fundamental drivers for innovation.

This is a posting from a group that delivers sustainable design solutions. Originally posted earlier this month, 9th of Oct, 2013, in The Guardian.

Rich Gilbert, co-founder, The Agency of Design

Design and the circular economy: toasters that won't be binned

After looking at how a chair manufacturer redesigned its products with their future life in mind, one company decided to apply the same thinking to the toaster

• Toasters for a circular economy - in pictures

There is no point designing a product for disassembly if it will end up in a shredder. Photograph: The Agency of Design

The Agency of Design embarked on a project a few years ago called Design out Waste. Excited by ideas of cradle-to-cradle systems and industrial ecology, we identified electrical products as our target.

Reality hit when we visited an electrical product recycling centre. Whole products were dumped by lorries, thrown on a conveyor belt and dropped through an industrial shredder, emerging as 1cm square flakes on the other side. While steel and aluminium could be separated, plastics were mixed and resulted in a low-grade output. The most valuable output is the circuit boards, which are separated and passed on to a smelter to capture a tiny fraction of precious metal, while the bulk goes to waste.

We had started the project thinking we would come up with all sorts of clever design solutions, but this visit revealed the truth: there is no point designing a product for disassembly if it will end up in a shredder. It highlighted the division between manufacturer and recycler. Even with the best design for end-of-life, there is no financial motivation for the manufacturer to change when only the recycler will profit. The manufacturer's primary motivation is to design for quick and cheap assembly.

Shortly after, we met with Orangebox, an office chair manufacturer which offers to remove old chairs from a company before delivering new sets. Primarily, this was to offer a better service to customers, but it had a big knock-on effect. Orangebox started disassembling old chairs to recover and sell materials. It was taking an employee 45 minutes to take the chair apart, however, and the labour cost was wiping out the value of recovered materials. Orangebox's design priorities changed and its next chair, The Ara, could be pulled apart by hand; materials were standardised and the next life of the product had been planned.

These were simple design changes that made material easy to recover and process and, most crucially, the manufacturer was getting its product back. These design changes would have made no difference in the collective model of waste recycling witnessed at the recycling centre, but by taking products back, Orangebox was motivated to recover material value as quickly and cleanly as possible. The solution was in concurrently designing products and systems. Designing a product without an understanding of where it will end up is useless.

We wanted to see how we could apply this thinking to electrical products. We had seen from the recycling centres that anything smaller than the diameter of a household bin is unlikely to get recycled, so we decided to design toasters, a simple everyday product. We named our toasters the Realist, the Pragmatist and the Optimist.

The Optimist

Part of the problem we were trying to solve was the obsolescence of products. The Optimist was designed to last for generations. A sturdy piece of die-cast aluminium, so simple there was nothing to break. The aluminium housing was also selected to future-proof its eventual recycling. Aluminium recycles to a high quality and the toaster itself was made of recycled aluminium, which can be infinitely recycled into other aluminium products.

Rather than a popping mechanism, the arms rotated out to the side so there were fewer moving parts, while four bolts on the base provide access to the inside where elements can simply unclip and be replaced.

As it was going to last a long time, we designed details to celebrate its age. The toast counter on its front clicks for every slice of toast, so when it's handed down through generations, your children will know you've enjoyed 45,316 rounds of toast...

The Pragmatist

The Pragmatist was a reinterpretation of the Orangebox model for toasters. We built a modular toaster, individual toasting slots clipped together to form the whole toaster. When an element eventually fails, the failed slot could be taken out of the toaster (leaving the remaining slots functioning) and returned to the manufacturer to be reprocessed and a new slot posted out. This modular approach allowed us to make the individual slots thin enough to fit through a letterbox so the product return could be as easy as possible.

The Realist

The realist looked for the closed-loop solution at the cheapest end of the market, something that would work for the £4.99 toaster available from a supermarket. We had visited dry recycling processing facilities with impressive visual identification and separation of products. In the future, this could be a route for small electrical products, but will require a method of separation that doesn't degrade and mix materials. Knowing that any labour time could eliminate the value of the materials, we developed a small pellet that sits next to a snap-fit joint, the whole product can be placed in a vacuum chamber (a cheap piece of capital equipment) and the pellets expand to undo the snap-fits, disassembling the product.

Design out Waste was an eye-opening journey into designing for acircular economy and sparked a string of further circular-economy projects, from lightbulbs to mobile phones and tool hire systems. There is a myriad of solutions out there; the key is thinking concurrently about products and systems.

Rich Gilbert, co-founder, The Agency of Design

The main Circular Economy & Economies related links to January 2013

The main Circular Economy & Economies related links to January 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100408996



http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/circular-economy

http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/davos-2013-circular-economy-opportunities-latin-america

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/circular-economy-private-sector-zero-waste

'Circular Economy' Promises Billions: Advocate
http://www.iisd.org/measure/knowledge/national/china.asp

http://www.chathamhouse.org/research/eedp/current-projects/circular-economy