Green design in progress

Tinkering with distribution networks, switching transport modes and cutting energy use in factories all play their part in greening the supply chain. But to make wholesale improvements, the process begins at the very beginning, in the design studio.

The German Environment Agency estimates that 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. Lighter products reduce the transportation burden and products with fewer materials in a simple design are easier to take apart for recycling. Designers can also cut out toxic substances, include features that cut energy use, and improve the durability of components to enhance a product’s lifespan.

Eco-designed goods are now appearing on the market. But they are still a minority. The sheer number of product lines that need to be re-engineered is one factor holding back progress. Another has been the failure of regulation to compel producers to re-design. Current policy might drive compliance, but it hasn’t provided the level playing field companies need in order to innovate and lead.

Bold thinking in practice

One iconic example of eco-design is the Aeron Chair from US furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. Sixty-two per cent of the chair is made from recycled material and 94% of it can be recycled. Parts are easy to disassemble and components are clearly marked to help in the recycling stream.

Product packaging is another area for focus in sustainable design. Global food and homecare company Unilever doubled the concentration of its Persil and Surf liquid detergents to cut the bottle size in half, bringing a 40% reduction in packaging and a 60% reduction in water usage. Unilever can also now deliver 156% more products on every truck, which means 30% to 40% fewer trucks on the road every year and significant financial savings to boot.

“The temptation is to nibble away at the edges and do incremental design improvements. But what’s nice about the Unilever project was that they took such a brave step,” says Mark Barthel, special adviser for retail innovation at UK waste reduction body, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP).

Closed loop logic

Some manufacturers and retailers are going one step further by designing a cyclical or “closed loop” process for their products. “Closed loop” recycling means that recycled content is used in products, goods are collected after use by the companies, recycled and then re-manufactured into new products. Recycling plastic has the potential to be cost eff ective, with the rising price of oil increasing the price of virgin plastic.

Ribena plastic bottles from GlaxoSmithKline now come in 100% recycled polyethylene teraphthalate (R-PET) plastic, and Marks & Spencer uses 50% recycled content in 63% of all its PET plastic packaging. Bottle weights have been reduced. Danone, which owns the Volvic, Evian and Badoit bottled water brands, has achieved a 30% reduction in the weight of its PET bottles in 15 years.

To promote recycling, companies are working with local authorities on initiatives to improve PET recovery and recycling. Danone is trialling PET collection banks in Glasgow city centre. And M&S will launch a recycling and collection service in five UK cities with recycling firm Closed Loop Recycling this year to encourage collection of its Food to Go range from offices. Labels on the side of the pack give details to sign an office to the scheme.

PET at a premium

One reason why companies are taking recycling matters into their own hands in the UK may be due of the lack of recycled plastic available for reprocessing.

Manufacturers and retailers want to use more recycled plastic, but with most plastic in the UK still going to landfi ll and the only R-PET available coming out of China, (where the UK also sends most of its plastic bottles to be recycled), supply is limited. “We simply can’t get enough,” says Helene Roberts, head of packaging at Marks & Spencer, referring not just to R-PET but also recycled HDPE for use in milk bottles. “We are using 10% recycled content of HDPE at the moment but we’d like that to be 50%.”

The high demand for R-PET is also pushing up its price, says Andrew McCaffrey, director of consultancy at UK recycling company Valtak. R-PET has historically been priced around 30% cheaper than virgin plastic, but that gap is closing.

As a result there are greater economic incentives to set up plastic recycling plants in the UK to secure local supply. This month, a plastic recycling plant opens in Dagenham in London. This will take 35,000 tonnes of recycled plastic bottles, including milk and soft drink bottles, and turn them back into raw recycled material for new food and drink packaging.

Dazzling SunRay

In IT, examples of eco-design include the development of desktop virtualisation or ‘thin client’ technology. Instead of desktop PCs individually running the power-hungry requirements of a computer including the central processing unit, this technology means the central server manages operations for a number of users.

Sun Microsystems’ thin client technology, SunRay, uses only 5% of the energy of a traditional PC. Sun has also designed super efficient processors that use a third less energy and space than competing products. It has also developed the first virtualized data centre that is designed to be 20% more energy efficient than traditional data centres through a new water-cooled design.

In its imaging and printing range, HP has recently launched features such as auto-on/auto-off technology as well as a carbon footprint calculator and an “Eco Highlights” label that encourage users to think about the energy-saving features of printing products and how to use them.

As Zoe McMahon, from HP’s EMEA environmental business management organisation, says: “We can design in energy efficiency until the cows come home, but if the customer doesn’t use a product appropriately, then all the environmental benefit is wasted.”

A coordinated approach

Green design features abound. But finding the balance between performance and sustainability is a delicate process. M&S was able to cut packaging on its green beans by 92% by removing the plastic trays and by 65% on meat packaging by moving to ‘skin pack’ instead of a tray. But removing packaging is not always the most sensible option, says Roberts, if unpackaged food becomes damaged and is subsequently discarded.

To identify hotspots and direct action, Andrew McCaffery recommends companies compete a carbon lifecycle assessment for products. “People have a misconception about where the burden will be,” he says. Packaging may account for 60% of a water bottle’s total carbon footprint, but it may be far less for a ready meal, he explains.

Cooperation between procurement professionals and designers is also essential in order to help source components from sustainable sources, adds Lena Staafgard from sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. One example she gives is of purchasing professionals working with product developers to find sustainable sources of palm oil.

Sluggish economics

Julie Hill, associate at UK charity Green Alliance argues that the economic incentives for designing products for recovery and recycling are still low, with the focus still on functionality, desirability and lower price.

The rising price of disposal driven by the UK landfill tax and the EU Landfill Directive is helping to boost the economics of recycling. But this extra cost still represents only a fraction of the overall cost of a product, says Valpak’s McCaffery, so is unlikely to have much impact on product or packaging design. He believes a more powerful economic driver will be the rising prices of commodities such as oil-based plastics.

The main reason businesses want to redesign products for the environment, says McCaffery, is to boost their corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials. Today’s consumer is increasingly averse to excessive packaging at the till and also wants to recycle more at home. In turn, retailers are picking up the mantle and driving change through the supply chain.

WEEE bit of progress

Advances and standardisation in ecodesign rely upon regulation, says Green Alliance’s Hill. Existing policy is aimed mainly at the electronics sector through directives such as the Eco-Design of Energy-using Products Directive (EuP) for environmental effects of products during their life cycle, and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) to improve the end of life management of electronics.

Still in development, the EuP will require manufacturers to introduce design changes that reduce the environmental impact of their products across the life cycle. This could be through design changes to improve energy efficiency, or through product information supplied alongside products. When fully implemented, says Green Alliance, this could be the first genuine driver of product re-design.

WEEE puts responsibility in the hands of manufacturers and retailers to provide infrastructure for the recovery and recycling of the products they sell. Users of electrical and electronic equipment should have the possibility of returning it free of charge.

Most retailers, or distributors, offset their requirement to provide infrastructure to take back electrical goods they sell by paying into a distributor take-back scheme. This allows consumers to return electrical goods to recycling points provided through their local authority. Curry’s is the only UK retailer that accepts goods for recycling in store. Since WEEE come into force in January 2007, says McCaffery, levels of recycling in the UK have undoubtedly increased.

Legal imperative

And in some respects the legislation has prompted better product design. Because Sun Microsystems can now profit from the material it recovers from customers, it has redesigned products to make the recycling process as efficient as possible.

Fifty per cent fewer screws hold together Sun’s systems today compared with five years ago, all plastic has been eliminated from computer chassis and servers are no longer painted. To return goods, customers fill out a form on Sun’s website. Sun then arranges collection within 24 hours. To encourage the return the company also offers an additional ‘cash’ upgrade allowance.

But the legislation could do more to provide a level playing field for companies, says Richard Barrington, head of public policy for Sun Microsystems UK & Ireland. “Legislation tends to drive compliance, not continual improvement or innovation.”

As he explains, Sun now complies with requirements of WEEE. But efforts to take eco-design further go unrewarded. Because, he says, most procurement departments are still only interested in compliance to environmental standard ISO 140001 or WEEE as an indicator of a supplier’s environmental performance.

He suggests that companies should rather be graded on their environmental performance to give innovators a competitive edge.

However sustainability is nevertheless becoming a sales driver, with new products and concepts designed around sustainability now selling fast. Products such as SunRay have been Sun’s fastest ever sellers.

What leading edge companies want now is an extra push to warrant further spending on R&D and new product designs to take their innovations to the next level.