Are you frustrated by stuff you have to throw away? Stuff where recycling or repair seems too difficult? Do you have solutions you want to share? The People’s Design Lab can help.

By joining the Lab you get connected to designers, scientists, fixperts and manufacturers. Together, we can unpick the problems and find solutions for achieving Zero Waste.

Nominate products you can’t recycle, re-use or repair for a People’s Design Lab Award. Vote for nominated products. Tell us about better ideas.  The first round of nominations and voting is open until 27th May.  <a href=”http://www.thepeoplesdesignlab.org.uk/about/the-peoples-design-lab/”>Find out more here!</a>

Are you frustrated by stuff you have to throw away? Stuff where recycling or repair seems too difficult? Do you have solutions you want to share? The People’s Design Lab can help.

By joining the Lab you get connected to designers, scientists, fixperts and manufacturers. Together, we can unpick the problems and find solutions for achieving Zero Waste.

Nominate products you can’t recycle, re-use or repair for a People’s Design Lab Award. Vote for nominated products. Tell us about better ideas.  The first round of nominations and voting is open until 27th May.  Find out more here!

Nine months into our activity as The Restart Project, we have stopped more than once to pinch ourselves. Last year, when we started throwing “Restart Parties” – community repair events, during which talented volunteers help people learn more about how to repair electronics, and often fix their broken kit – we only had the smallest group of volunteers. We just threw ourselves head long into our cause – to empower people to reduce waste – and what has always impressed us is the organic growth of our committed group of repairers. New repairers turn up at events, find us online, get referred by friends.

We owe all of our momentum to our Restarters, a fun yet serious group. We would like to take a moment to introduce two of our committed repairers, and share their approach to repair.

John, a long-time Camden resident who is one of our most engaged volunteers writes:

“Common sense is very useful but not exactly what’s needed with some of the complex problems we meet. I’d call it ‘thinking outside the box’ or a Sherlock Holmes mentality, not that common…
I encourage people to treat repairing as a challenging game, where the prize is the working object plus the satisfaction of overcoming the obstacle. By default, win or lose, unconscious learning and experience is gained.”

David, an east Londoner who has a background in tech and telecommunications, and is a privacy and civil liberties activist, writes

“The skills needed for most repairs are: a lot of common sense, some limited experience (acquired at a Restart Party), good research skills and access to a few tools. For example, if you can deal with a blown fuse, you have some understanding of continuity and if you have ever touched a lit light bulb, you understand that current generates heat. So when a device stops working, first steps are to check that everything is still connected, that electricity flows, and that there’s no dust or crumbs blocking any fan (an air duster often comes handy).
For how to open a device such as a laptop or a mobile phone, that’s where the research skills comes in handy as it is likely already documented somewhere on a web page or a video.
Experience will be useful to realise how hard to pull on a part to pry it open while being careful to avoid ripping out a hidden connector, or that using an egg carton to store screws in the order of each step helps to find them again when time comes to reassemble things.”

Both believe in the empowering and transformative aspect of repair. John shares:

“I like to ask Restart Party….customers? attendees?..participants?..what they find difficult in attempting repair themselves, will they try in future? We need to destroy the mystery of these magical gadgets everyone uses without any idea of how, why they work, or are made…..and the occult knowledge needed by the priests of repair. Maybe to see the insides of their beloved iPod would spoil the dream created by Apple, that this device just manifested into being, beyond the power of man…. alien technology or a higher force.”

And David says:

“For more than twenty years I’ve been communicating to demystify new technologies and software development, initially – and how to reclaim our civil liberties, later.
What attendees get out of the Restart Parties should be much more than a repaired product: a willingness to fix their electronic products in the future and some basic repair skills. The Restart Parties are an occasion for collaborative repairing, where there are no geniuses, just more experienced Restarters (and hopefully soon to be Restarters). It is for this transformative process, when attendees realise that many repairs are accessible to them, that I am involved in Restart.
The confidence gained at the Restart Parties by some attendees to start fixing things on their own is the most rewarding part of the experience.”

If you are reading this, perhaps you have a skill worth sharing: maybe you know how to make a slow PC faster again. Or you know how to clean a printer, or how to extend the battery life of a smartphone. Perhaps you are a professional repairer or a tinkerer, and you can teach us more. If you’d like to get involved, please contact us on our website or on Meetup.com.

This includes an inspiring panel debate, live music, a keynote presentation on the Circular Economy and Cradle to Cradle® plus an interactive window display incorporating textures as well as scents alongside sensory boxes, where hands can be placed inside to guess what’s being concealed. This year’s event also sees the return of the ever popular Drawing Gymnasium with Trevor Flynn of Drawing at Work.

Great Recovery project director Sophie Thomas will be the key note speaker on Thursday 23rd May, with “Redefining the Role of the Designer”.

See here for detailed schedule.

Six months in and The Great Recovery programme, run by the design team within the RSA’s Action and Research Centre has begun in earnest. Our investigation into new design methodologies for a circular economy has thrown up some big very complex challenges. Trying to consider the re-design of even a fraction of the 600 million tonnes of products consumed in the UK is a pretty daunting task.

We are a linear nation with only 19% of the materials in those products being recovered and re-used in the UK. Our current best practice for recycling electronics is to sort, crush then export to somewhere else to refine. Of the 40 odd elements in the ingredients list for each of appliances even the best recovery facilities in the EU can only recover at best 16. A designer may come up with the best design for disassembly but with our current infrastructure there is still a very high chance it will end up on the e-waste mountain. The answer lies in the re-design of the ‘material to manufacturer to consumer’ system and making it circular.

Resource scarcity feels like a problem that should be solved by technology or sorted by government. The reality is that this challenge is so big and complex everyone must pick up the gloves. When approx. 80% of the environmental impact is locked in at the concept design stage[1] the reason why we bring together designers, technologists, chemists, waste experts, manufacturers and businesses to face the mountain is clear. The material recovery path must lead the design process and this process must be co-created by all those that are part of the supply and recovery chain.

Our investigation has focused on re-imagining products by looking at their material flow cycles; taking emphasis off the product itself which, you could say ‘borrows’ materials for a period of time shaped into a form before ideally releasing them back into the cycle at the end of the product’s life.

We do not currently design or manufacture like this. This becomes obvious when you take these objects apart and try to split out the ingredients. Toothbrushes, disposable coffee cups, books, TVs, houses; all designed and manufactured with endless lists of materials that are moulded and fused together by machines on efficient production lines, but in the process making them impossible to disassemble so that materials can be recovered.

Our workshop participants swapped their studios and offices for rooms that overlooked enormous waste mountains deep inside packaging recycling plants, textile sorting centres and electronic waste recovery facilities. We spent days in engine re-manufacturing factories, material science laboratories and went down a disused tin mine in Cornwall. These places were physical demonstrations of the potential value in resource and the current best, but by far complete, practice of recovery. Those that came to the workshops walked away with a new sense of reality that came to be known the ‘Fear, Farce and Challenge’.

1. The Fear is a reaction many of the designers have expressed when they are asked to ‘look at the product they spent months designing, launched to much fanfare a year ago that now sits in the mountain of rubbish’.

Waste is a design flaw. Current design process only takes us to the point where the consumer picks it from the shelf and takes it to the cashier. We rarely consider what happens post-consumer and when we do our knowledge is out of date and often incorrect. Designers hide behind the brief saying they have no power, they only deliver a service – so brief writers were invited to the workshops too.

2. The Farce is the growing realisation that in order to make these appliances we had to source piles of raw material (including some from war torn areas, or perhaps extracted using slave labour), invest in numerous production processes around the world and ship them from continent to continent incurring many ship and air miles’.

A new laptop can cost you under £300 but if you track the flow of raw materials from the mines to the factories and distribution centres the average computer travels the equivalent of three or four times around the world before they end up in the hands of the customer. Designers have to work with the global market system and it would be naïve to think otherwise but understanding material flows and designing to circular economy principles could result in more local and less carbon intensive production. Traceable supply chains designed around transparency can enhance resource security and support the corporate social responsibility objectives many large manufacturing businesses have adopted.

3. The Challenge is to re-think the design of our products from first principles. Pull an item off the waste mountain and take it apart. Understand what is in the product, where the materials came from and why they are there? Most objects disassembled at the Great Recovery workshops were not generally made to be taken apart. Take LCD TVs that have hazardous light tubes full of mercurial vapour, which must be taken out by hand before they can be put through the crusher. Some models have over 250 screws requiring 15 different screwdrivers to undo before you can extract anything.

The process of deconstructing an object (also known as ‘tear-down’) in order to understand how it has been put together and how it can be improved is a well-established design tool. Many Japanese electronics companies train new designers on the recycling floor before they are allowed to enter the design studio. Many designers talk about their misspent youth tearing apart anything they could lay their hands on with nostalgia and joy. It engages the practical maker/creative part of the brain and even the hardiest consultants and heads of finance attending the workshops had glints in their eyes when handed a pair of safety specs and a hammer.

This newly re-set vision allows you to see things in a different way. Some things become ridiculous – a disposable electrical toothbrush becomes an electrical appliance with a 4-month life designed with multi-moulded unrecyclable plastic, a long life battery and almost as many elements as a mobile phone; some things become opportunity – a laptop is for life and is fixable, upgradable and eventually will be sent back to the manufacturer for dissassembly and re-use, but everything seems to need re-designing.

The Great Recovery is supported by the Technology Strategy Board that is funding 50 feasibility studies selected through their competition on re-designing for closed loop systems. www.greatrecovery.org.uk

Read a blog post written by the Gaia Foundation’s Teresa Anderson for an insight into the inspiration of the report here, and download a copy of the full report here.

Do you remember that feeling when you first unwrapped your latest new phone, tablet or laptop?  That shiny, sleek form suggesting science fiction made fact; the gorgeous glowing graphics connecting you to the creativity of the whole world? Go on, admit it, some of you might have even gleefully hugged your beautiful little gadget.  Perhaps you lovingly stroked it, or at the very least casually dropped it into conversations for the next week, to the amusement of your friends and colleagues…

Such is the powerful hold of the new generation of electronic gadgets, that few of us are totally immune to their allure. They are addictive, futuristic, almost other-worldly. But of course they are not really other-worldly at all.

One of the successes of their slick design has been to help us forget that these gadgets started life as part of the Earth, in the form of rock, mineral and oil. And that the transformation from subterranean mineral to sleek mobile has involved a staggering amount of land grabbing, ecosystem destruction, pollution and fossil fuels, as well as a terrible human cost in war and poor working conditions. There are hundreds of components in each of these gadgets, using dozens of metals and minerals. The path each component takes from the Earth to be extracted, smelted and processed criss-crosses the planet through complex routes that companies fail – or refuse – to track.

A new report from the Gaia Foundation and allies[1] exposes how the accelerating consumption and wasteful disposal of our electronic gadgets is leading to growing ecological and materials crises. “Short Circuit: the Lifecycle of our Electronic Gadgets and the True Cost to Earth” was launched this week in the Houses of Parliament, alongside the London Mining Network, Friends of the Earth and the Great Recovery project.  The report has been produced in collaboration with the African Biodiversity Network and others.

With the number of mobile-connected devices projected to exceed the number of humans on Earth by the end of 2013, the report draws attention to the vast and accelerating amount of metals and minerals that are being mined from the Earth for these gadgets, only to quickly return as wasted and toxic landfill.  With alluring marketing strategies that entice us to upgrade after 18 or even 12 months, the consumer cycle is getting ever shorter, and the pressure on the Earth’s materials, ecosystems and communities ever more demanding.  Counter-intuitively, it seems that the smaller and sleeker the gadget, the greater the “ecological backpack” of minerals, metals and pollution involved in their production.

The deliberate design for built-in obsolescence is one of the means by which phone and computer companies can ensure an eternally hungry market. Many mobile phones have embedded batteries that cannot be replaced when they die; when computer components break they often cannot easily be removed and fixed; and hardware is frequently not designed to keep up with software. This strategy can be an effective technique to increase sales, but it is hugely wasteful, and requires more and more of the Earth to be extracted, used, processed and polluted to meet this growing demand.

The Gaia Foundation works with communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America on issues around agriculture, biodiversity, climate change and indigenous rights. Until recently, the threat to their territories from mining, and the link to everyday gadgets such as mobiles and laptops was nowhere near our radar. But three years ago we began to notice that more and more of the communities we worked with were simultaneously raising their concerns about land grabbing by mining companies. It seemed that something had changed, and the rate and which this change was happening set alarm bells ringing.

Our research confirmed this suspicion, and the Gaia Foundation’s 2012 report “Opening Pandora’s Box: a New Wave of Land Grabbing from the Extractive Industries and the Devastating Impact on Earth” exposed how, due to a convergence of economic, geological and technological factors, mining was no longer about isolated pockets of environmental and social destruction. With many of the planet’s richest areas for mineral and metal ores already used up, processes to extract them were becoming all the more aggressive and targeting ever more pristine ecosystems. In the case of copper, companies often need to extract ten times the amount of earth as they did 100 years ago, to produce the same amount of metal. To produce a single gold wedding ring now requires the extraction of 20 tonnes of earth.

Short Circuit tells the second part of this story, and brings the analysis closer to home. It shows that our myriad electronic gadgets, and the systems that create them, are major drivers of the growing demand for metal and mineral extraction. The report tells the story of a mobile phone’s traumatic “birth” (involving land grabs, destruction of ecosystems, conflicts, toxic legacies and poor worker conditions); an ever-shorter “life” (fuelled by rapid upgrades and planned obsolescence); to its wasteful “death” (the vast majority of electronic waste is sent to toxic “digital dumps” in the developing world, or ends up in landfill.).

The report highlights not only the lack of recycling of electronic waste; but the lack of designing for longevity and recyclability.  With the steady depletion of the Earth’s metals and minerals, and the electronic lifecycle becoming ever shorter, companies face an inevitable crisis in sourcing materials if they do not take action soon.  However recycling is only part, albeit a necessary part, of the solution.  We must also examine our cultural attitudes to consumption. Useful new initiatives range from the Restart Project and iFixit initiative which empower people to repair their electronics, to ideas about extended producer responsibility, circular economies, the “new materialism”, the gift economy and Transition Towns.  All have much to teach us and must be part of the way forward.

It seems that the very tools that supposedly bring us ever greater and faster connection to our friends, family and work are also powerful symbols of our deepening disconnect from the Earth. It is time to join the dots, to reconnect, to close the loop and birth a new relationship to the electronic lifecycle, and our own attitudes to consumption. Coveting our “futuristic” gadgets can instead mean being mindful of the legacy we will leave to our Earth and the generations to come.

There will also be a Gaia Evening event on the 24th, celebrating the launch with friends and supporters.

See the full series of Resource Revolution Leaders here.

In line with their High Value Manufacturing Strategy, the Technology Strategy Board is to invest up to £500k in feasibility studies to stimulate new business models supporting innovations in high value manufacturing. They are seeking feasibility studies across the whole manufacturing lifecycle.

Get more information and download the brief here.