"Waste is design gone wrong" John Whittall

Recently I read the report "Investigating the role of design in the circular economy" from The Great Recovery project in the UK. From that report I like to share with you the parts that will help you to design eco-effective.

What really comes forward in this report is the importance of design to create a good impact. It all starts at the design stage. But in order to make the design work it is important that from every aspect of the supply chain there is someone involved with his own field of expertise.

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"Most of the time something is designed for effective manufacturing, not effective recovery. One of the designers expressed his dismay on visiting material recovery centres: All the amount of time, effort and detail that product designers spend putting into their work is roundly mocked at the end of the device's lifecycle when it is destroyed by an all purpose crushing machine." (p31)

That is not what we want, isn't it? So let's design for a circular economy!

In the report they mention four ways of designing:

Designing for Longevity
This means the user must be able to upgrade, fix or repair the products. And there must be a good relationship with the product which makes the user want to keep the product or pass it on to others.

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Designing for leasing/service
These are functional products that are not needed daily or only for a short time period and which the user is able to share with others. When the user does not like it anymore it can be returned to the brand, then it can be leased to another user.

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Designing for re-use in manufacture
These are products that are really functional but also aesthetic and which the user wants to have the latest version of. The designer needs to make it interesting for the user to give the product back to the factory. The individual parts of this product can then be re-used during manufacturing.

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Designing for material recovery
This is a loop for fast flowing products like packaging. There need to be a recovery stream as soon as they have finished being used. The products for this loop need to be redesigned to fit the existing recovery and recycling systems. Here it is really important to create good communication to the users so these users put the materials in the right streams.

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The report also comes up with a lot of interesting recommendations and actions, for the design industry, new business approaches, networking and policies. I picked out the ones that are directly linked to the scope of the designer:

• Embed circularity in the design education system (Refinity: or search for education on circular design when you are already graduated)
• Realign new and existing tools around the challenge of designing for circularity
• New generations of designers must be system thinkers
• Adopt skills, which are in danger of dying out, and investigate their possibilities on applying them with emerging technologies.
• Collaborate: connect designers with engineers, material scientists, anthropologists, marketeers and business people.
  
• Encourage your client to redesign their design brief around new business models that consider a circular approach.
  
• Investigate consumer behaviour and attitudes.
  
• Move away from designing of built-in obsolescence towards design for longevity.

How are you going to implement this in your way of working?

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A project initiated by RSA 
You can find the full report here:
http://www.greatrecovery.org.uk/the-great-recovery-report/