Preventative Approaches to Design

I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking at the items around me. Holy smoke. Everything was designed by engineers, architects, technicians, and artists. Absolutely everything - even the potted plant that tries desperately to remind me of the real world.

A few blogs ago we talked about the open and closed cycles of energy. Before industrialization, energy flowed in a closed cycle. All of the energy coming from the sun was absorbed and radiated out into space. Our use of fossil fuels has created open cycles. An increasing amount of energy is staying with us and warming the planet.

We can think about materials in the same way. If we reused everything, all material would flow in closed cycles. No garbage. Sir Isaac Newton steps in again, though, with his second law. Everytime matter changes it becomes more random, and it takes energy to reduce its randomness.

Think of a handful of marbles. If you drop them they scatter across the floor, becoming more random and less useful. A lot of energy (bending down and gathering them up) is required to turn them back into a usable handful.

A large length of steel is the same. Say the length is cut into the tiny pieces used in the frame of your laptop. After a couple of years the laptop wears out or becomes obsolete or unfashionable. You do the responsible thing and recycle it. Consider the energy involved as you deliver the laptop to a depot, people at the depot gather lots of laptops together and ship them somewhere else, perhaps far away, the laptops are disassembled, and the pieces, if worthwhile, are sorted by material type and shipped somewhere else, again perhaps far away. Then, great amounts of energy are applied for melting and reforming. Usually, the quality of the material has degraded enough that quite a bit of new raw material must be added to the mix.

This is the recycling scenario that we spend so much money on and are so proud of. Unfortunately, given the way products are designed, recycling is the best we can do. It's better than just throwing the stuff out, but not much.

The sustainable solution is to design products so that the materials in them remain usable, with minimal rework, for as long as possible. With a lot of thought and coordination, the discarded material from one product can become the raw material for another.

Estimates have revealed that it may be possible to maintain our society with as little as 10% of the current raw material extraction and processing. That means 90% less garbage and 90% less energy used by industry. There may be hope for this poor exploited world.

Could this ever happen? Are we wasting our time and money concentrating on recycling, when we should be thinking how products are designed?

Next post - Designing a Car.