Sustainability Ideas

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.

Drink up, the postman is coming!

There are upwards of 300 billion drinks bottles produced globally every year. At an average of 15g per bottle, that represents virgin plastic production of over 55,000 tons of PET. OK, I have taken a really conservative view of the number of bottles produced based on the few facts I could find, so the real situation is in fact far more severe.

Even Coca Cola has recently demonstrated that not disposing of all of this waste is no longer acceptable with their announcement to build a recycling facility to recycle all of their bottles. I have been thinking about this and have some ideas that could help. The big problem for the manufacturer is how to get their original bottles back? If they can do this, they will effectively have just loaned you the plastic and will get it back to recycle or reuse thus saving them the cost of buying new virgin plastic (a commodity that keeps going up with oil price hikes!) In the recycle process today, the bottles are collected and become raw material for another company in the plastics food chain to resell to Coca Cola! If we were to make the manufacturer responsible for the disposal of their containers, we would have a way of tying the costs associated with recycling back to the original manufacturer, or alternatively, they would have the opportunity to reuse and possibly save money on the cost of the containers. Economic incentives are always good to encourage action!

So how can we achieve this loop? There are a number of ideas, but the one I like the best is to use the existing infrastructure. That is, the postal services.

Imagine if every bottle had an address and pre-paid postage stamp of the company recycle point printed on it. All the consumer need do is collapse the bottle, screw the cap on and pop it in their mailbox.

Of course this could just as easily apply to household cleaners and other plastic packaging. Now we are talking hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic.

I like this idea because it ties the costs of disposable packaging directly back to the original manufacturer. In fact, if the containers are being returned to the manufacturer, there is little reason to recycle, probably most could be reused, which would represent a considerable saving in virgin materials as well as energy required to re/manufacture it.

I know it is a crazy idea, but the postal system would love it (increased volumes in empty returning residential postal delivery trucks), the environmentalists would love it (make the manufacturer responsible for their waste), potentially the manufacturers would love it (get their original material back) and I believe the consumer would like it (making the “polluter” responsible for disposing of their own waste problem).

There are more efficient ways of achieving this, I know, but this one provides for maximum options to recycle and I like that a lot!

A wealth of information

Joel Makover's Two Steps Forward is a great blog with tons of interesting information about what business is doing to become more sustainable. I highly recommend that you bookmark it or subscribe and get knowledgable!

When you go green, remember you need to be ICONIC!

Who would have thought that environmentalism and iconic design would be sharing the same sentence?

Well, I for one am pleased to report the marriage of these 2 design trends as a match made in heaven.

Who remembers their first visit to The Body Shop? It was over 20 years ago for me, but I remember very clearly the smells and the bright, fun presentations of soaps. There was orange, apricot and apple and many more. Apple was my favorite, and then more exotic aromas such as cinnamon and vanilla. The tables seemed to be overflowing with smell and color and natural goodness. Hey and I am a man, remember! Never before had I enjoyed going into a pamper parlor, I even bought something from them! In fact, I have now bought many things. The Body Shop combined sustainably correct manufacturing with environmentally sound products and an outstandingly different approach to retailing. They gave birth to the notion of sustainable products that stand out in an iconic manner through their design.

I think it is quite safe to presume that if you are going to enter into the sustainability area, that you will need to start thinking about how you are going to stand out from the crowd because if you do not, you stand the risk of being considered as simply one of the other commodity products on display and very few consumers are going to notice your strong and compelling point of interest. Many companies have fallen into this trap and it is because the y are applying normal consumer values instead of looking more carefully at who is buying these products. It is not the laggards and the late majority customers (yet). It is the innovators and the early adopters still.

Therefore, I believe that sustainable products NEED to be iconic and stand out in order to announce their compelling new benefits to these consumers. However, we are not atlking about stand out ridiculous here. There is a fine line that you ahve to walk when designing a green product between making it look outrageously different and making it communicate  that it is a normal product in most respects, but better for the environment. There is a great article about this in the Boston Globe.

Fast forward to 1999. Method, the home cleaner company out of San Francisco is born. They come to market with biodegradable, environmentally friendly soaps and cleaners in a compelling design package and shake the industry! Even P&G is paying attention. And so they should! Well guess what, there were many biodegradable cleaners out there, but none of them came in iconic packaging that stood out and compelled you to investigate what this strange new thing had to offer. Method dares to be different and have reaped the rewards.

What about the Toyota Prius? Here is another sustainable offering that makes its mark. When you look at the first generation Prius, there was little to distinguish it from an ordinary car. With the second generation, Toyota took a little bit more risk (actually that was probably a lot more risk for Toyota!) and produced a vehicle that breaks the mold. The cars competitors, the Camry, the Ford Escape, Honda Civic, Nissan Altima and Saturn Aura do not stand out and therefore have not captured the public’s imagination. Even though they may offer a better benefit!

Come on folks, this is not rocket science. The customer who is concerned about the environment is a passionate, involved individual. They are not afraid to take a risk to try a green offering; they are already convinced they want to. The only thing that matters now is which one will tell the world about their commitment and values in the most compelling way.

I believe the reason they like these stronger, more iconic designs is that they help to make a statement about them. Look at me, I buy Green! That is why film stars buy a Prius, it makes a statement about being environmentally conscious that a Saturn Aura just will not achieve!

To make sure your next sustainable product or range stands out in a positive way go to www.mygreenbrand.com

Sustainable Design means more than just materials!

Clients often ask me if I can replace the materials that they make their products from with a sustainable version.

Sure, if you replace the type of fuel you put in your car the next time you fill up!

While there is a lot of development going on to create new more sustainable materials - especially plastics, the reality is that most mass produced products today use petro-chemical based plastics. We cannot change this over-night. The petro chemical industry is about 50 years into it’s R&D cycle, while the biodegradable plastics industry is only about 10 years in. Give it another 10-15 years and we will have materials qualities that are comparable to todays plastics. So the time is coming to replace petro-chemical plastics but for now the opportunities are somewhat limited.

So what can you do? The first step would be to help you assess if there is a chance of using one of the newer developments to replace your materials with and if not, perhaps there is a different material that we could use if we redesign your product. This in itself can lead to new interesting solutions that could create a strong point of differentiation for you. Think here of the fast food industry and how they have moved from polystyrene to paper based wrapping. I would argue that the customer experience has in fact improved through this exercise in environmental improvement!

Toxicity is another issue that you can address more easily than materials replacement. Improvements in toxicity are a valid claim and help the environment. An analysis of your materials and materials suppliers will quickly highlight the areas that need addressing here.

The third area concerns the energy used in your product lifecycle or embedded energy. This concept takes into account the amount of energy used to create the product and includes all aspects from the creation of the materials to the manufacture and assembly of the product to the shipping and storage of the items until they reach the consumer. Finding opportunities to reduce the embedded energy ultimately mean opportunities to save cost in the product/manufacturing/distribution cycles.

Energy use doesn't stop at the point when the product is sold. Many products then go into active service where they consume energy over their useful life. Even the humble light bulb has an energy use that far exceeds the original purchase price of the product. Don't under-estimate the running costs and possible competitive advantages to be gained by redoing these! Think of what the compact fluorescent is doing to the traditional bulb market. Australia is even considering banning the tradional (energy sapping) bulb altogether!

The final aspect of energy use comes into being in the end of life strategy for the product. Creating materials from a virgin chemical state requires huge amounts of energy. Recycling and reusing materials is far more efficient and conserves natural resources. Rethinking the product lifecycle as Interface Carpets did is a surefire way to make huge savings. Interface effectively decided to lease rather than sell their carpets in order to recycle the carpets raw materials. End of life strategies to reuse and recycle components require the manufacturer to think through the disassembly options they can use. In Europe regulations are requiring certain industries to recycle their products and if you take the long term view of this, all industries should and probably will be required to over time. It is only by instituting such thinking that we will get our minds focused on conservation of resources and looking for the commercial opportunities that would exist in recycling products.

Possibly the biggest marketing opportunity lies in the upgrade option. Used cleverly this can lock a customer into a longer term relationship with you and at the same time provide an opportunity for providing an upgrade/refresh step at a much better margin. Most products are designed today for disposability, but what if we designed instead for longevity. Think of all the issues that you would need to change to achieve that instead and the possibilities for a continuous revenue stream from a customer base instead of having to find new customers every year as your new range comes out!

Finally we come to the really interesting part of Sustainability innovation where the magic can happen.

Breakthrough innovation.

Start by re-imagining how you can provide your benefit without a product. Could you deliver the benefit through a service? Could you reduce the amount of physical product? Could you employ the computer in a person’s home to do part of the function? Could you create a carbon neutral version of your product? Could you, as Toyota are doing, imagine and set in place a roadmap to replace the most harmful aspect of your product over time and in so doing set your company off on a path to differentiation and a market advantage that could put you in a dominating position?

Imagine you could and let us help you make it possible. Research has showed that more than two thirds of consumers would rather buy a product from a company that is doing good! Wouldn't it be nice to exceed the expectations of your consumers, improve the environment and become a stronger competitor? For more information go to http://www.mygreenbrand.com

Sustainability offers the chance to achieve all three.

A Challenge to the Design Community

In 2002 The United Nations set up the Millenium project with the noble cause of halving poverty by 2015. I support this effort and hope you feel motivated to contribute some of your resources to become the generation that achieved it.

It is now nearly 2008 and we are almost halfway there. A number of interesting ideas have been developed and we have added our own. Our main idea is that in order to tackle poverty on a global scale, we are going to need some global solutions to support the scale of this operation. So while I applaud the Millenium village’s project (rescuing one village at a time) I think that we need to have developed some tools for the villages to use. That will surely result in greater effectiveness and a faster spread of positive results than just contributing time and money on the ground.

I liken this to the building of the railroads. If all that the pioneering magnates had done was employ people and sent them out to the railhead with a shovel, it would have taken a lot longer to build the infrastructure. So it is with these villages. Let's design the infrastructure package that needs to be dropped in by container to each village just ahead of the UN team arriving, so that we can be sure of leaving infrastructure of value behind. Designers of all disciplines can play a really important part in contributing to such an effort.

With that in mind we wrote the Challenge to the Design community, a manifesto that suggests ways that the global design community can contribute their much needed time and skills to solving some of the world's most complex problems.

To read more about the Challenge to the Design Community see the full article on Green LLC's Website