Sustainability Ideas

Breakthrough idea for Household Cleaners

I read a news article on a breakthrough idea this morning that has major implications for the cleaning category – and for that matter any other liquid based product category.

There is a brand of household cleaners called Conserve that are like 409, Windex, Fabreeze, Lysol , Seventh Generation, Greenworks, Terracycle and Method except that these products ship without any water!

For most cleaners the water makes up about 90% of the weight of the product, so by not shipping the product with the water in it, the manufacturer saves shipping costs for 90% of the weight of the product. So what you say? Just think of all the gas, wear and tear and labor you would save if all liquid products did this!

They have the same cleaning power as the national brand products because they are also liquid cleaners – which are better than traditional powder or tablet based cleaners.

Not only did they figure out how to save all the water and keep the cleaning effectiveness the same, but they also figured out how to gain even more Environmentally Friendly benefits by delivering the cleaner in a tablet form and then shipping 4 tablets for every empty bottle sold! That means they saved not just 90% of the weight of one bottle, but rather that of 4 bottles. The savings throughout the dealers logistics system are immense. Now they have also saved 75% of the warehouse and shelf space that the product would take up, made the product light and easy to carry and on top of all that 3 plastic bottles from the landfill!

Seriously when last did you hear of an environmentally friendly product that saved 390% of the shipping cost, 75% of the warehouse and shelf space, 75% waste from the landfill and it is made of DfE (the EPA’s Design for the Environment) Earth friendly chemicals.

Now comes the real knock-out blow. You know how all green products seem to have to cost more than the equivalent conventional product? Well these environmentally friendly products actually cost about 40% less than a conventional product because of all the cost savings from saving the weight of the water.

Way to Go Baumgartens – the manufacturer of the CONSERVE Cleaners! If everyone followed your level of innovation we would really make a difference to the world’s sustainability in a rather short period of time.

Do you have any applications that are liquid that could benefit from Baumgartens new tablet technology? If you do start a conversation with them and help the world!

Conserve, a breakthrough in thinking.

For the last year I have been working on creating a new brand to offer consumers products that perform better and make more sense for the environment than other products on the shelf, called simply and clearly CONSERVE.

Last year we launched a range of disposable dishware made from sugar cane and disposable cutlery made from corn starch. These materials and processes offer an interesting alternative to paper and plastic respectively. They are relatively new technologies versus their more harmful alternatives and as such are very much still in their early stages of development.

Their characteristics are not at the level that you could use them in all applications, but they meet the requirements of these simple disposables easily and have far less impact on the environment as both are annually renewable resources that replace trees – at about 20-25 years to produce and oil for plastics at a few million years!

In addition to their benefits on the resource side of the equation, these products have the real added benefit that they are also compostable and biodegradable which means that they return to the natural biosphere to add nutrients to the soil in roughly 6 weeks.

It is possible to find alternatives to the present way that we produce products; the problem comes with the cost. For these 2 technologies at least there is nowhere near cost parity between them and their non-environmentally friendly alternatives. We are looking at a cost premium of roughly 3x still and even at that price we are still able to find customers that will buy, but the volumes are substantially below normal non-environmentally friendly products. Most of the market research I have seen points to a premium of roughly 10-15% being the level that a consumer says they are willing to pay for environmental friendliness.

As the recession hit its full stride in October last year I feared that we would see the business communities interest in environmental friendliness wane as it has in the past 3-4 cycles of environmental enthusiasm, but much to my surprise we are still finding that environmentalism is high on business peoples agenda with a number of companies mandating that their supplies purchases need to become more environmentally friendly. I think this time the issue has indeed created enough attention to have become a more normal requirement. This represents a real breakthrough in thinking and gives me great hope for developing the brand and environmentally friendly alternatives in the next year or two. Watch this space in June as we are about to announce the launch of a real game changing product in the cleaning category!

Have you identified the environmentally friendly technology that can replace your present technology?

Sustainability - the New Luxury

At the core of extreme luxury is the notion of scarcity. Now there’s a funny old thing!

As we move through this century, the world will increasingly face scarcity, which will in turn make many of the basic resources that we have taken for granted up to now – luxuries!

Imagine oil at $150 a barrel, water at the same price and electricity charged at a premium over a certain low usage amount. In such a scenario, the ability to produce one’s own resources, water, energy and even clean air would become the ultimate luxuries.

The flip side of this would be that products that use resources much more frugally would become the most desired version, because of their much lower running costs!

Well that scenario is then and this is now! Today, efficiency and the ability to produce clean water or generate your own energy, don’t seem to hold much value to anyone at all as these are basic commodities, at a really affordable price to the general public. Will we ever get from today’s scenario to the above one?

The ultimate sustainability metric is the number of people who have become resource, energy and biosphere positive! Meaning rather than using up natural resources, they actually produce more natural resources than they use. In other words they change the nature of their consumption from, well, consumption to production! And production, in general, makes you richer! Herein lies the trigger to changing consumption habits. When people understand that they need to pay more for a version of a product that produces rather than consumes, we will have set the world on a new course towards a more positive future

It seems to me that in order to encourage this sort of behavior it is going to need to be a position to aspire to. One that has a certain status attached to it that makes it aspirational for the general public.

In this regard the Toyota Prius is quite remarkable. In a market where there was NO alternative to the internal combustion engine greenhouse gas producer, the first halfway decent offer, just took off like a rocket and has grown in sales probably well past Toyota’s expectations. I wonder how much the notion of scarcity has played into this success. By driving one, you are in fact making a statement about your beliefs. Certainly this is the reason that you buy one, because it does not cost less than the combustion engine equivalent over its useful life.

I can’t help thinking there is a fantastic business opportunity for a company to simply base its value proposition on the fact that it’s products are energy/carbon/biologically neutral. There is a strongly growing segment of the population who are ready and willing to buy. If only the offers existed in many more categories.

Are you treating sustainability as a defensive strategy, or as the ultimate value proposition?

New Product Development Strategies for creating sustainable products.

Green LLC, the leading sustainability Design consultants, has just completed a comprehensive research study analyzing how companies create sustainable products. This study examined 560 products across 30 product categories from home decoration to transport and buildings. The study takes a broad view of the type of objects that you might encounter in your daily activities. The study builds on the excellent work done by Alastair Fuad-Luke in his book, Eco Design, the Sourcebook (Chronicle Books, 2004).

The studies objective was to identify the top techniques companies are using in each product segment. One of the outcomes of the study is an important understanding of the link between product type and the particular sustainability strategies that can be employed to create new sustainable value.

The top 5 techniques, across all product categories, that are being used to develop sustainable products are in order of importance;

1.       Using renewable materials

2.       Using recyclable materials

3.       Reducing the amount of material

4.       Using recycled materials

5.       Creating multifunctional products

There are big differences in approach depending on the product category. For instance in Kitchen Appliances and Consumer Electronics, energy efficiency and management are far more important strategies while in Automobiles, lightweight construction and fuel efficiency are more important.

The study also sheds light on why so many companies focus on the wrong area to innovate. The basic misconception is that companies want to improve their sustainability through using renewable materials. This is because there are a few categories of products leading the sustainability drive, such as furniture and buildings, which are inherently made from materials from nature as opposed to the universe of consumer products that are essentially made from technical or manmade materials. It is easier in these categories to focus on finding better natural alternatives than it is in the tech sectors.

This is one of the first studies to analyze approaches to sustainability and it does a good job of building the body of knowledge required to design successful sustainability solutions.

The key to understanding what issue to address when designing new sustainable products is to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to identify what is causing the biggest environmental effect. Green LLC offers a very reasonable solution to get designers and new product developers going. Once that is understood it is a relatively easy task, using the Green Sustainability Strategies study, to apply the correct sustainability strategy to address the issue/s.

Do you know what the best approach is to creating sustainable value for your product?

Time Based Design

One of the advantages of doing a Life Cycle Assessment for your product is that you, finally, get a snapshot of the effects that your product has on the environment. Few can really imagine this without doing the exercise, but once you have been through it a few times, you have a new heightened sense of what to do when you design.

In the calculations for an LCA, the amount of time that a product is used is only calculated as the amount of energy or renewable it uses during that useful time. The resources that went into making the product are considered “used up” during the making process.

However, what is also clear is that we need to account for the actual hours of usage or hours of materials utilization. So for instance a clock that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in fact is utilizing the resources that went into making it to the maximum. However, a stop watch that is taken out 6 times a year for the kids swim meet and used a total of 10 minutes on each of those occasions is in fact a rather poor use of those “used” resources.

In the western world, most of our products are of this latter nature. I.e. we buy them for convenience, to have the functionality for those very few occasions when we actually need them.

So there is another dimension that we are not even measuring yet, that is the cost of convenience! This idea needs to be factored into the use component of a product Life Cycle Assessment. When we do this, it will become apparent that there are a number of techniques and ideas that could improve our total materials usage.

Take the hacksaw, by making the blades replaceable, we extend the total usage of the frame, a major materials usage aspect of the product. Another good example from the DIY market is the 3-1 product. Here a single motor powers 3 smaller functional modules for the drill, sander and jigsaw functions. In this manner we save 2 rechargeable batteries, 2 electric motors, casings, wiring, plugs, packaging and Instruction manuals! The concept provides a huge saving in total materials as well as a real usage increase for at least the heaviest parts of the product! And still according to some of the figures I am seeing for typical product usage, these combination products will have very low actual utilization versus their planned lifetime expectation.

There is a whole new category of products that we need to be designing. Convenience products!

This will be a hard sell to the consumer who believes they are avid DIY’ers. That is a separate challenge! For now there is a major opportunity to redefine what a product really needs to achieve. When we split off the majority of the users from the really heavy users, we will in fact have a whole new category called the convenience shopper who could do with a MUCH lower specified product, combination products or new service model approaches. A lower spec could allow for new lightweight, lower strength materials to be used, thus saving on high impact materials and production processes.

What if we specify the design of a product for the average use of the product rather than for the extremes of use? How much global resource could we save?

Giving Thanks ...

If you have grown up and live in the West, there is certainly a lot to give thanks for. Just look at any statistic on living standards to reduce yourself to a position of humble gratitude, or not, depending on how you look at it. America is celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow and I think it fitting to give thanks that I grew up in the “west”.

I have a theory about the world and its development over the past 1000 years or so.

The minority of the World’s population lives in the colder Northern Hemisphere. The majority of the world’s population lives  in the more pleasant climes of the tropics. Smart choice perhaps? Anyway, funny thing is, those Northerners are the part that we now refer to as developed!

Have you ever noticed when you get cold and miserable how fast you set about rectifying that situation? I think that this is mainly what has driven the development of the “Western” world. “Western” has always been a wrong description for the Developed world. So is “Developed World”. I think it should be stated for what it is. The Northern Hemisphere. Look at a satellite image of the world at night and you will see that this is the most accurate description.

Apparently we really are driven by need! And so I give thanks to my forefathers for not wanting to b e cold any longer and finding solutions to that hardship and a thousand others. If only you could see how we live now. IT would have made your kings look like paupers!

So what is going wrong? When I look at the tropics and Southern Hemisphere I certainly see some enormous human needs, very fundamental ones at that. For example the lack of drinking water, food, basic health and security. It seems like my simple theory may not be working out so well.

Why is it that there is so much misery in the world and yet we do not seem to be able to do  much about it? Why are the people of the tropics and Southern Hemisphere not able to drag themselves out of poverty in a similar way to our forefathers who were also faced with adversity?

Has the skewed development of the world perhaps pushed these people past the tipping point of extinction and if so, do we not have a moral obligation to solve this problem?

Imagine if...you shared with your neighbors

I have been developing a set of creativity tools for my sustainability consultancy, Green LLC, for the past 6 months and to my surprise I now have over 150 ways to help companies to innovate and become more sustainable!

During my research this week I came across a series of pieces that spoke about consumption and suddenly they are starting to make connections in my brain. I share this idea in the hope that someone is triggered to see how we can solve it in an elegant way.

First, I saw a great picture of a Japanese family (average Tokyo house size around 800-1200sq ft remember) who had taken all their worldly belongings out of their house and spread them out on their front lawn. It was quite an amazing visual!

Wow, so much stuff! Now consider that the average American house is 2500sq ft!

One of the techniques I researched was the idea of usage. Stop and think for a minute of all the DIY tools out there. The countless drills, saws, screwdriver sets, axes, shovels and hammers. How many hours usage a year do you suppose these tools get versus how much a tradesman or builder might use them? In general the things we own see very little actual usage.

Now cast your mind over to the developing world, were there are literally billions of people without access to simple tools! Of course this applies just as much to kitchen tools, sports tools, recreational tools and so on.

Our relative wealth has afforded us above all else the notion of convenience. That is why we own our own hammer, or 2 or 3! So in order to make an improvement in sustainability we need to arrive at a better system of creating convenience.

Is it so stupid to imagine a system where 4/8/16 neighbors share certain resources? We already agree to share swimming pools and tennis courts for this reason.

Maybe we need a new type of house/neighborhood design to achieve this with a central common area, or a new way to think of common spaces in apartment living where each floor shares a workshop, sports room, special kitchen tools cupboard, games room or sewing room. Imagine that when each of these collectives were being set up that the owners would actually sponsor a duplicate set of tools for a village somewhere in the developing world.

A collective of 4 families would only be paying ¼ each instead of having to buy 4 separate sets of tools. They may be happy with a saving of 50% and doing good as well. It gets way better when more share!

This thought ties in to my previous blog in that it takes the individual purchase and product up a notch to become part of a system, an infrastructure item that has a life that exceeds that of an individually owned product. It also utilizes the resource better, in this case by a factor of 4-16x!

This is a VERY substantial improvement because when I do Life Cycle Assessments for companies, we are looking for ways to reduce the environmental impact of a product. Often we can only make 10-40% improvements, but with this simple change of ownership idea we reduce the impact by much more. When we extend the usage of the product we divide the impact up over many more hours of use!

This saving far exceeds anything that we could achieve on the manufacturing side and besides, we end up doing real good for the developing world.

I have been working on a Social Sustainability project to support the Millennium villages, a project of the Millennium Development Goal initiative of the UN to reduce poverty by 2015. The idea I am working on is to develop micro-economy pods, called Green Pods. These pods make use of a container to be dropped into a developing village that would kick start economic activity in that village. The above idea would work really well as a means of financing a small basic workshop to be dropped into a village. This would provide the means for them to start to make things and therefore to start craft based product production. This affords them the means to create basic essential products for themselves as well as for sale.

Can we rethink ownership of objects in a practical, convenient way for Western Society?

Designing Sustainable Products.

There are a lot less Eureka breakthrough moments than there are small continuous improvements. Both are needed to get to fully sustainable products. By focusing on improvements of any magnitude, we force ourselves to start to think about the issue and it is only then that brilliant minds might have the chance to arrive at Eureka breakthroughs in the area of sustainability. Ray Anderson of Interface is already a long way down this road.

Nature provides us with a classic and iconic example of a sustainable product - a tree. The tree takes in light from the sun and carbon dioxide from the air which it uses to convert nutrients it gets from the earth through its roots into food to produce new leaves and growth. In winter it discards its leaves by dropping them onto the ground around it. The tree drops more than it needs for food, thus enriching the earth for other varieties of plants to grow. When it dies it decays and becomes rich food for new trees and plants. The cycle of growth and enrichment of the natural environment continues.

How are we to think of manmade products as elements in a growth rather than a reduction cycle?

Unfortunately man made products are designed as only one part of a system. I.e. they are designed to be made from materials we extract from the earth (wood, metals, oil – converted into plastics), to be used and when no longer needed, they are thrown away where they become useless, dangerous landfill. There is no return path of manmade products to raw materials that can be reused or recycled.

This is not the only problem with manmade products and certainly not the only ill effect that they have on the natural environment. However it is the most important problem to address to stem the continuous waste.

We need to focus on asking and forcing better answers to the question, what will happen at the end of this products useful life?

How are we going to enable this product to be more easily recycled or reused?

The difference between a tree and your...

If you have ever had the privilege of hearing William McDonough talk you will know that it is a very inspiring experience.

McDonough has a simple very clear thought. Our industrial world does not work like nature. Take a tree. A tree is a product that exists in nature and has many useful functions. It recycles CO2 from the air, produces nutrients and grows leaves. It provides shade and a windbreak for more delicate plants, when fall comes it deposits more nutrients onto the ground around it than it needs, thus enriching the environment where it exists.

Not so for man-made products. Take for example the much heralded iPod. It delivers the ability to have all your music with you wherever you go, but it cannot provide its own energy and what happens at the end of the products useful life? A life cut short by our way of progressing technology in small incremental steps. And after you have seen a new version come out (note, not when it no longer works!) useless landfill material, here we come!

A tree is arguably a perfect piece of technology, perfect in the way that it operates as well as the way that it fits into its larger eco system. Whereas man-made objects certainly are not perfec, they are made from technologies and materials that are constantly evolving and improving which most often translates into becoming more powerful.

This is one of the most profound issues we face on the road to sustainability. The Universe has an overall design. Everything has its place and a defined dependant function. Change is glacial, often taking centuries, so the whole system can adapt.

McDonough refers to this part of our world as the bio-sphere. The man made part is referred to as the techno-sphere. The characteristics of these 2 systems are vastly different.

Essentially the techno-sphere is very much temporary, rapidly changing and developing, without any grand plan or roadmap. There is no one creator of this system, but rather millions of creators, often working with little or no regard for what others are doing. As this system evolves, that isolationist thinking is changing as we can witness from the world of electronics, global banking or any other system that has evolved to a global level. Who actually knows where we are going? Certainly if they do, they are not in charge or regulating the development of the techno-sphere at all. The techno-sphere is characterized by the fact that there is no plan to complete the cycle. Products in this system are produced, but there is no plan for what becomes of them after their useful life. The cycle is only half completed!

Capitalism is a system built on the principle of making new value efficiently, not sustaining or nurturing or preserving it. That seems to need another way of thinking to achieve.

A new economic system needs to be developed. One which says that you are responsible for ensuring that what you produce has a plan. A cycle that ensures that it returns to useful raw material or reuse at the end of its useful life and that instead of producing waste, you produce the raw materials for a new process.

How do we think of this? Does a tree get any value from the waste it produces? Sure. The nutrients go back to the soil and help as food for the tree as well as other plants. Does the tree get paid for this food production? Not directly. This is where capitalism fails us. If there is no value to be made (in the form of revenue that exceeds cost) then it will not be taken up as an activity.

The central question to ask in moving towards sustainability is how we can profit from completing the cycle from raw material to raw material instead of waste.

The carpet industry may be able to offer the best insight so far. The industry consolidated through the last century and now consists of only a few players. That means that when one of the participants, Interface, took the initiative to become more sustainable through the commitment of its leader, it forced the other players in the industry to follow suit or be seen as the bad guys in the eyes of the consumer.

Most carpets today are thrown out as building rubble at the end of their life. This means that the carpet industry needs to get new virgin plastic material for every ounce of new carpet that it makes. Where the industry is rapidly moving towards is the position of recycling all of the old carpet and only adding the material that represents the growth of the industry (so probably in the order of 5-10% instead of 100% new material. In other words the industry is organizing itself for collection of old carpet as food (much like fallen leaves from a tree) instead of letting it go as waste. Why is this important? Plastic is an oil based material, as the price of the diminishing resource of oil rises so too does the cost of plastic. Virgin plastic that is! Over time this industry will have become 80-90% more efficient in its use of new plastic material! That is a stunning thought and a proof point that such a change of thinking from waste to food is achievable.

Take this analogy a step further. See raw material as a limited resource instead of a phone call away and it becomes clear that there is an absolute advantage in becoming the one who collects all the raw material in the first place. Say you are a 10% competitor in the carpet industry. What happens to your revenue and power when you become the one to collect and recycle and resell or hold onto 90% of the raw material? Nothing today. But in a few years from now when the limited nature and continuously rising price of new virgin material starts to hurt?

We live in interesting times. We are starting to rethink our industrial complex. It is like a new land grab, gold rush or colonization phase in history. As we shift our thinking from waste to raw material, so we have the opportunity to shift the relative positions of power.

Are you thinking about how you can profit from the waste side of the cycle? Green LLC can help you to think through strategies to do this as well as help you to work on the innovations that are invariably needed to make these strategies possible.

Sarasota International Design Summit

The Sarasota International design summit will be held in Sarasota, Florida from November 5-7. Last year it was a real winner. Why? The organizers of this conference have taken a big picture view of Design, the conference is not focused on any one discipline, but rather on how design is having an influence in the world, from service design to the design of spaces and sustainability. This conference has a great track on Sustainability that is well worth going for. Speakers include Susan Szenasy, METROPOLIS Magazine; Constance Adams; NASA International Space Station - TransHab; Valerie Casey, frog design; Valerie Fletcher, Adaptive Environments; Rachel Deller, DOTT 07 Eco-Design Challenge, UK; Lars Strandberg, AmericaEconomia and LUK, Luxury + Style, South America; Chris Ramey, Luxury Marketing Council-Florida, Miami and many more.

For more information on the conference go to the conference website.