Sustainability Ideas

Imagine if...you shared with your neighbors

I have been developing a set of creativity tools for my sustainability consultancy, Green LLC, for the past 6 months and to my surprise I now have over 150 ways to help companies to innovate and become more sustainable!

During my research this week I came across a series of pieces that spoke about consumption and suddenly they are starting to make connections in my brain. I share this idea in the hope that someone is triggered to see how we can solve it in an elegant way.

First, I saw a great picture of a Japanese family (average Tokyo house size around 800-1200sq ft remember) who had taken all their worldly belongings out of their house and spread them out on their front lawn. It was quite an amazing visual!

Wow, so much stuff! Now consider that the average American house is 2500sq ft!

One of the techniques I researched was the idea of usage. Stop and think for a minute of all the DIY tools out there. The countless drills, saws, screwdriver sets, axes, shovels and hammers. How many hours usage a year do you suppose these tools get versus how much a tradesman or builder might use them? In general the things we own see very little actual usage.

Now cast your mind over to the developing world, were there are literally billions of people without access to simple tools! Of course this applies just as much to kitchen tools, sports tools, recreational tools and so on.

Our relative wealth has afforded us above all else the notion of convenience. That is why we own our own hammer, or 2 or 3! So in order to make an improvement in sustainability we need to arrive at a better system of creating convenience.

Is it so stupid to imagine a system where 4/8/16 neighbors share certain resources? We already agree to share swimming pools and tennis courts for this reason.

Maybe we need a new type of house/neighborhood design to achieve this with a central common area, or a new way to think of common spaces in apartment living where each floor shares a workshop, sports room, special kitchen tools cupboard, games room or sewing room. Imagine that when each of these collectives were being set up that the owners would actually sponsor a duplicate set of tools for a village somewhere in the developing world.

A collective of 4 families would only be paying ¼ each instead of having to buy 4 separate sets of tools. They may be happy with a saving of 50% and doing good as well. It gets way better when more share!

This thought ties in to my previous blog in that it takes the individual purchase and product up a notch to become part of a system, an infrastructure item that has a life that exceeds that of an individually owned product. It also utilizes the resource better, in this case by a factor of 4-16x!

This is a VERY substantial improvement because when I do Life Cycle Assessments for companies, we are looking for ways to reduce the environmental impact of a product. Often we can only make 10-40% improvements, but with this simple change of ownership idea we reduce the impact by much more. When we extend the usage of the product we divide the impact up over many more hours of use!

This saving far exceeds anything that we could achieve on the manufacturing side and besides, we end up doing real good for the developing world.

I have been working on a Social Sustainability project to support the Millennium villages, a project of the Millennium Development Goal initiative of the UN to reduce poverty by 2015. The idea I am working on is to develop micro-economy pods, called Green Pods. These pods make use of a container to be dropped into a developing village that would kick start economic activity in that village. The above idea would work really well as a means of financing a small basic workshop to be dropped into a village. This would provide the means for them to start to make things and therefore to start craft based product production. This affords them the means to create basic essential products for themselves as well as for sale.

Can we rethink ownership of objects in a practical, convenient way for Western Society?

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!

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.