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?
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