This blog is a follow on to his piece The New Plastics Economy – a breakthrough, and not only for plastics.

Last week I wrote about the recent report on the New Plastics Economy, claiming both that it’s a breakthrough for plastics (particularly packaging), and that it positions the Circular Economy as a force for creating a new, transformational, conversation about resources.

I didn’t really explain the latter point and several people asked why I think the Circular Economy has this particular potential. Let me explain, starting with a brief trip to the zoo.

Imagine we are zookeepers. We have an elephant. But the zoo visitors are bored with the elephant and really want to see a panda. What do we do? It’s an incremental change, surely – a large mammal, four legs, probably fits in the same enclosure, we can retrain the keepers to feed it on bamboo shoots. We take a close look at the elephant, with panda in mind. It’s too big, the wrong colour, and it’s nose is too long. So we put it on a diet, start some plastic surgery on its trunk, and buy some black and white paint…

If you think this is ridiculous, remember just how strongly we business people have adopted the mantra that “you get what you measure.” So it is when we try to reduce our business “footprint.” We emit carbon, so let’s measure that and set a target to emit less; same with water, waste, and so on. If we’re really ambitious we make the target zero. But what if we have the wrong animal? What if there is a different take on our business, which doesn’t have a negative footprint in the first place, but instead is regenerative and restorative with the resources it uses?

If we take the incremental metric-driven approach, this positions business as inherently bad – the best we can do is to be less bad. This needlessly contaminates reputations and stakeholder engagement. Lots of activists think business just is bad, period – and with this mindset we’re proving them right! So we end up in attack / defend mode in external conversations, on subjects where a bit less bad isn’t good enough – ocean plastics waste, for example.

Also, this pattern of thinking really limits the strategic options we may consider. Measurement is good for comparing options, and it’s absolutely essential for tracking implementation. But measurement alone will not tell us to change the shape of our business – from linear to circular, say.

So the reason the circular economy conversation is different is because it starts with the shape, not the metric. It starts with an idea about a different way of meeting our familiar customer needs. In essence that’s a question of design, of the product, and of parts of the supply chain and business model. And if that makes it seem scary, it turns out not to be, on the whole:

• It’s an idea people readily get, about as close to common sense as you will find in solving complex problems.
• And it’s full of opportunity to actually do a better job for the customer – better products/services, and better value for money. It simply turns out that, if we think broadly enough, it‘s neither particularly effective nor efficient to use stuff once and throw it away. Is that really such a surprise?
• Finally it doesn’t mean changing everything, so it’s not something which we could never do and only a disruptor will do it, putting us out of business. We can still build on the skills and knowledge we have, and many of the same assets. We need a new animal, but not a completely new zoo!

And when we bring the metrics back into play, to evaluate the new strategy, it turns out that on dimensions like carbon, water, waste etc, the circular model is typically far more efficient – the “footprint” may even be negative. We get this multiple payoff because we’ve got to the root causes, and developed a better system, rather than trying to force improvements out of the old system. We can answer different questions: How good is our business, not how bad? What problems are we helping to solve, rather than to create?

Where this gets most challenging is not with technology, or economics, but with collaboration. The whole point of the circular economy is it’s a systems-level change – it has to work across whole supply chains, whole industries. In among loads of innovation and competition, there will need to be some areas of convergence and harmonisation, Here the winners will be those who do a standardised thing faster / better / cheaper. Waste collection needs such convergence. But why should that be impossible? We’re talking about a few specific dimensions of the system – even Apple uses standard USB and mains plugs! But there will need to be new processes, and new governance, to make this happen in a world of constant innovation and fragmented governance.

So the zookeeper does need to buy a panda, and find a new home for the elephant (when the poor animal has recovered). For business, let go of the metrics (temporarily) and just have a go at re-conceiving your business in a circular form. This won’t be a game of solitaire – you will need to collaborate. But you may be surprised how good you can be.

Sophie Zajicek, a weave designer and RCA graduate, is investigating the potential to create 3D printed ‘woven’ structures.

GR: Hi Sophie, tell us a bit about your project

Whilst at the RCA I worked with Oluwaseyi Sosanya who was developing a 3D weaving machine. It’s very similar in concept to a 3D printer, and I really wanted to further develop my ideas for printing ‘woven’ structures. My work is going in a really exciting direction at the moment – using Fab Lab London as my base and source of all 3D printing knowledge. I’ve been developing 3D printed materials that are based on woven structures, with the circular economy model ever present in every stage of the design process.

Developing textiles for the circular economy is achievable through the use of a 3D printer. A traditional weaving loom creates waste at the start and finish of each warp and a selvedge along the edges of the fabric that is then discarded. I can see potential in 3D printing to reduce or wastage.

Using the 3D printing facilities I am developing material samples that aid my research into creating shock absorbing textiles solely from one component. Cutting out any excess waste and additional materials usually required for spacer/ shockproof fabric. Using a 3D printer to create textiles enables me to transform traditional weave structures from the x and y axis into the x,y and z. It frees one from the constraints of a loom and adds a third dimension to the fabric.

GR: How did having access to Fab Lab and The Great Recovery support you in developing your ideas?

SZ: Through The Great Recovery and Fab Lab I have been able to develop my circular project design theory. I have relied heavily on the expertise of the Fab Lab team throughout my design development as I went into this project with no knowledge of 3D printing. During my time at Fab Lab I have slowly begun to understand the limitations of the machines, the software, the materials and therefore begun to realise the holes in my initial project aims.

The Great Recovery have given me a deeper understanding of the circular economy and the problems faced by manufacturers and designers when trying to tackle this challenge. However, I have only scratched the surface and am keen to push my project further.

GR: What challenges have you come up against as you’ve tried to design for circularity?

SZ: Sourcing and interpreting data has been a challenge. And because 3D printing is a new field for me getting to grips with the various software programmes has been a huge learning curve and has used up much more of my time than I anticipated. Whilst the technology is really versatile I’ve also found it hard to achieve the desired outcome using the materials I have access to in the Lab. A combination of these challenges has slowed down the development of this project.

I am in the process of testing a new software program, Gravity Sketch,which has been developed to give designers a more intuitive method of designing 3D forms. It is this transition between Gravity Sketch software into Rhino and then into product I have been experimenting with. This process has been a huge learning curve for me, as I find Rhino totally unintuitive to navigate, which is where Gravity Sketch comes in. On top of this designing process I’ve had to learn how to use various 3D printer software and learn that patience has a whole other meaning when dealing with all of them together on one computer, in a short space of time!

GR: What role do you think makerspaces, like Fab Lab, have in helping people design circular products and systems?

SZ: Fab Lab is the perfect platform to help designers initiate projects when facilities and space are incredibly hard to come by. Having expert advice on tap has been a big advantage and being able to access many different machines in one area, using a variety of different materials, is a great way to encourage immediate creativity and design development of circular products.

Find out more about Sophie’s work here

Any readers of Robert Macfarlane’s recent work ‘Landmarks’ will recognise some of the sentiment in this blog. His book, which opens a window onto a lost lexicon which we once used to communicate our experiences of the landscape spoke to a frustration of mine, and something which has come up many times during the Great Recovery work: the discord between experiences of the material world and the language we use to describe it.

I consider myself a maker, and derive a lot of pleasure from crafting materials, and learning to understand how they work.  Joy and wonder too, come in discovering the cultural stories behind the products, materials and systems that surround us. But far from expressing their characteristics and quirks, the common English language available to us to discuss these materials, their properties, origins and the way we use them, is at best dull and at worst obtuse and misleading. Let me give you a few examples:

“Recycle”

First used in the mid 1920s in a technical context, and not until the 70s and 80s in common parlance, our increasing interest in sustainability has led it become an everyday word, as both a verb and noun. But do we use it too much? Involved in some awards judging earlier this year, I was disappointed to see that products involving reuse and products involving recycling were lumped together into the ‘Best Recycled’ category. Apples and pears springs to mind.

In a circular economy reuse describes something used in its current form (clothes sold through a charity shop, for example, are being reused) whereas recycling involves the recovery of materials to be made into something else (plastic bottles to plastic bottles for example). I would argue that if we do not actively mark out this difference with our language we will fail to conceptually grasp the depth of these highly variable activities, and their hierarchy – reuse is preferable to recycling. Imagine we had only ever conceived of ‘ball games’ with no words to differentiate between netball, football, rugby… Understanding and marking out this difference in meaning is fundamental within a circular economy that requires specificity about material flows.

There are fragments of the ‘pre-recycling’ age in our language: one of my favourites is ‘shoddy’. Its meaning has evolved, but it was originally was quite particular to a process we would recognise as recycling. It described the cheaper cloth made from broken down and rewoven fabric, its shorter fibres and reduced strength leading to its pejorative meaning today. There are still a few factories making shoddy in the UK, the remnants of a once significant industry.

The blanket use of ‘recycle’ has had its day, if nothing else, let’s all agree on that.

Renewable?

Primary school science and geography will tell us that the things we touch, eat and which give us energy are split into two neat categories: renewable and non-renewable. But even at that age we knew it couldn’t be that clear cut: surely the charcoaled matter that produces oil and gas could be renewable given enough time, and some trees take centuries to grow despite biomass being advertised in the renewable camp.

Does it need to be this way? Imagine all the words we could have for the temporal aspect of materials: those which grow in someone’s life or in the time it takes for a season to change; plastics which will be able to exist in their same quality when your great, great, grandchildren are old or those which will degrade safely into the soil by next Christmas.

Which leads me neatly on to…

Plastic

More than any other this material has transformed our lives and our interaction with the everyday products around us. Its etymological roots are in Greek, meaning ‘substance which can be moulded’, and its introduction in the early 20^th century saw an explosion of new, cheap and radical designs for everything from brushes to chairs to phones. It brought enormous benefits, and enormous problems. Our oceans are now riddled with microscopic particles of plastic and we’re only really beginning to understand what this might mean for the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants.

But given the enormity of the beast we hold it in little reverence. Plastic = cheap, ubiquitous and homogenous. But nothing could be further from the truth. There are many different types of plastic each with specific properties. And despite its image as an eco-demon many of these plastics are the most suited materials we know for closed loop recycling and maintaining their useful quality.

Of course, all of these varieties do have names: Polyethylene terephthalate, Polypropylene etc. and perhaps these are poetic in their own way, but they sure as heck aren’t making their way into everyday conversation, ‘Hey Joe, pass me the bottle. No, not that one, the High-density polyethylene one’. And their acronyms don’t fare much better, PPE, HDPE, PET…

Telling the difference between them without some serious analysis or a long string of letters after your name is not an easy thing to do. But some people can do it, and by touch and sight. I’m not suggesting that we all need to go through such rigorous training. But we are, every one of us, part of the vital flow of these materials through our everyday lives and we need to see ourselves as that. As Sophie Thomas learnt earlier this year when she took to the bins, we aren’t at the start of a chain of waste disposal, we – our homes, workplaces, hands – are integral nodes in the complex system.

“Sustainability”

From green, to greenwash, eco to sustainable to circular. We’ve been through quite a lot of iterations in naming and renaming this new fangled concept (for the West anyway) of not trashing the place we lay our heads. Whilst this changing vocabulary can be confusing, and risks being skeptically perceived as ‘greenwashing’, this honing really important. It’s an example of us trying and failing to get our ideas and our language right. It doesn’t fit, we change it and it clarifies meaning and responsibility. So stick with it, we’ll get there.

Language deficit leads to attention deficit

As Macfarlane argues, language deficit leads to attention deficit. Integral to the power of the Great Recovery’s work is in taking the hands on approach to what is around us. Investigating and questioning in order to understand and define the different ways we should be designing our products and systems.

We need to do this for language too. At a recent roundtable of our network we heard from waste managers and reuse networks about the importance they see in the way we talk about our waste. In seeking to ‘design out waste’ we need to look at these materials afresh. The dump or tip has been renamed the Household Recycling Centre to help us to change our view of the products we no longer want. This shift is vital, but the choice of words is fairly uninspiring.

Perhaps we could take more delight in materials and their flows? Why make do with recycled, renewable, composite? With all the grace, eloquence and enchantment they fail to conjure up.

Just as Macfarlane wonders what happened to our aquabob (an icicle in Kent), skord (a deep indentation in the top of a hill at right angles to its ridge, from Shetland) or yarpa (Orkney peat full of fibres and roots), I wonder what our experience of the world could be if the unpleasantness we associated with ‘waste’ didn’t enter our minds with the word itself.

I am not arguing for sonnets but I am advocating for clarity from our choice of words and, perhaps more demandingly, beauty. The stuff of which our planet is made allows us to sustain life and until we can understand, respect and engage with that we are bound to see these materials and processes for a fraction of their true value.

So here’s a simple challenge to everyone, including myself: choose your words a little more carefully – don’t say recycle when you mean reuse. It’s a start.

Image by Rosmarie Voetgli via Creative Commons

Since early October, retailers in England have been required to charge customers 5p for every plastic bag they use. Similar legislation is already in place in the rest of the United Kingdom, where it has been highly successful in reducing the number of bags used; in Wales, shops hand out 71% fewer bags now than they did before the levy was introduced in 2011, and in Scotland the number is down 80% in just a single year.

Although the levy introduced in England is unlikely to be quite as successful as these examples, primarily because it does not extend to SME’s, it is still bound to reduce plastic bag use by a significant amount, without costing much or introducing major bureaucratic burdens.

The policy is welcome but it is also a missed opportunity to spark greater shifts in consumer behaviour and a wider conversation about consumption and wastefulness.

Behavioural psychologists describe the phenomenon of ‘spillover effects’ where engaging in one activity affects the likelihood of engaging in another. One such effect is called ‘the foot in the door’ effect: individuals who have already agreed to an initial small request are more likely to agree to a subsequent, larger, request. The classic example of this is an experiment in which homeowners in California were initially asked to display a small sticker in their car or window urging safe driving, and then subsequently asked to place a large sign in their front lawn.

Individuals who were asked to put the sign in their lawn without previously being asked to display the sticker had a relatively low rate of ‘compliance’. Individuals who were asked to display the sticker urging safe driving and then subsequently asked to display a sign with a different message (to ‘Keep California Beautiful’) had significantly higher rates of compliance. When the sticker and the sign both urged similar behaviour, compliance increased again (though by a much smaller margin).

In explaining this shift, the researchers suggested that agreeing to the first request might help to induce an attitudinal shift in an individual. Having started to think of themselves as ‘the kind of person who does this sort of thing’, their later action is more likely to be consistent with this self-perception. Having said which, spillovers can be negative as well as positive (such as in the cases of moral licensing, where I allow myself to eat an entire packet of biscuits as a reward for going for a short run), and in any real world scenario there are other behaviours, desires, and impulses which may take precedence.

Some people are wary of applying behavioural insights to policy making but since 2010 the government has no such qualms, setting up and growing the Behavioural Impact Unit (whose founder David Halpern recently spoke at the RSA). Its work shows how small re-calibrations of the choices presented to individuals can yield significant behavioural change.

Given this, the introduction of the plastic bag levy could surely have been an opportunity to catalyse wider change. Instead of not using or reusing plastic bags being seen primarily as a cost-avoidance measure by consumers introducing the policy with an unashamed tone of environmentalism and celebrating the possible emergence of new green behaviours may have cultivated different attitudinal change. It could have helped lead people to see themselves as green consumers (or, at least, not wasteful). This attitudinal change could then have yielded additional pro-environmental behaviours, either through support for further government action (such as a drive to reduce plastic in food packaging) or voluntary corporate or consumer action.

The levy could also have prompted a civic conversation about consumption more broadly. Indeed the latent potential of the levy as a catalyst for a re-thinking of our approach to consumption outweighs its direct environmental worth.

These conversations are already happening; the RSA’s Great Recovery Project is an excellent example of how approaching these issues in the context of design can energise people to think not only about their own consumption, but about material flows through society as a whole. Unfortunately, these discussions have yet to break into the public sphere for a sustained period of time.

Given the Government’s enthusiasm for using behavioural science in public policy, their reluctance to do so in the context of the levy might seem surprising. Unfortunately, it does seem consistent with their approach to environmental issues since the election, with cuts to subsidies for renewable energy, abolition of zero-carbon standards for new houses, and reduced incentives to drive fuel-efficient cars. It is the government’s lack of commitment to tackling environmental problems, rather than an antipathy towards the use of behavioural methodologies in public policy that provides the best explanation for this wasted chance.

The plastic bag levy is therefore merely a good one off initiative rather than an element in a much needed broader strategy for environmental behaviour change.

Image: Day Donaldson via Creative Commons

I’ll start out by confessing that I come from a manufacturing background. And if there’s anything a production or supply chain manager likes, it’s a nice consistent stream of raw materials, exactly when and where you want them – same quality, same strength, right colour and size.

Post-consumer waste, on the other hand, likes to turn up unannounced, maybe in a random location (left on a street corner instead of sent to the WEEE program?), maybe in a rare colour or strength, and definitely mixed in with lots of other things.

So, there are plenty of challenges in trying to match supply and demand of recycled materials for a working circular economy. For mass production there are ways to overcome these challenges – principally by homogenizing the product to a generic raw materials stage (e.g. pulped paper, pellets of a particular type of waste plastic). This works. But we need other solutions, too. Partly because so much waste is disposed of in quantities too small, or too geographically dispersed, for mass recycling to be a viable option. And even when mass recycling is economic, re-using materials without having to totally melt them down or mash them up or whatever can save a lot of energy.

I believe that the maker movement, with people learning or re-learning skills to repair, change, and create physical objects themselves, offers great hope to the circular economy. Individually the amount of waste material re-used may be small – but it can happen anywhere and everywhere, so it adds up. Here are a few of my current favourite examples:

First up is Plastic Fantastic Kenya. They have set up their very own recycling system, teaching environmental awareness in schools around Nairobi and implementing a scheme where, in the absence of any recycling infrastructure, children can bring their family’s plastic waste to school for it to be collected and delivered to skilled artisans. Those craftspeople turn the plastic into beautiful jewellery and accessories which are sold both locally and internationally.

Now let’s turn to the Agbogbloshie recycling scrapyard in Accra, Ghana. Commonly misreported as being an e-waste dump, it is in fact a hub of recycling enterprises that strip cars and computers down to their constituent materials. Large-scale, commercial markets exist for almost all the waste streams – but still they see value in bringing more maker skills into the process. The Agbogbloshie Makerspace Project promotes development both of tools for more efficient or safer recycling, and products that can be made from recycled materials.

For makers who don’t have such a ready source of waste materials, finding what they need can be a challenge. I recently got involved with South-London based The Remakery, a soon-to-open community workshop for upcycling and making things out of waste materials. This solves the problem by being an aggregation mechanism – companies donate waste materials, which are stored at the Remakery for members to select what they want to use. A digital solution to the same problem comes in the ArtJunk app, which lets anyone upload a photo of interesting “junk” they see in a skip or on a street corner, automatically tagged with the location, for anyone interested to go and pick up.

The poster-child of the maker movement, the 3D printer, will be rearing its head here too. There’s a flurry of startups developing machines that can melt waste plastic and re-extrude it into the filament used by 3D printers.When every village has a 3D printer and one of these, some types of plastic will truly be taking part in a circular economy.

These are just a few examples of maker skills being the missing link that can bring waste material back into use – but far more innovation is needed in this area. Have a think about it. If you’re a product designer, how can you design your products for this kind of re-use at the end of their life? Or how about turning your attention to devising new matchmaker systems for waste materials to meet their ideal new use?

Imagine this situation – you are holding a till receipt. What do you do with it? Stick in your pocket? In the bin? In the recycling? Many of us would probably go for the 3rd option (perhaps after carrying it around in our pockets for a bit!).

In this case though, recycling could be exactly the wrong thing to do. Yes, there is paper there – but most thermal paper, including most till receipts, contain Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical proven to disrupt our hormonal systems (otherwise known as an Endocrine Disrupting Chemical). You may have seen water bottles labelled as ‘BPA Free’ – and it’s now banned from use in baby bottles in Europe.

The risk assessment committee at the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has concluded that the use of BPA in thermal paper should be banned as a risk to workers, though their socioeconomic committee is debating the economic implications of this action.

So, given that BPA may be banned from till receipts, should we really be recycling them? Recycling will recirculate the BPA into new applications – including, potentially, food packaging made from recycled paper.

This is just one example of the complexity of the overlap between the circular economy and chemicals policy. We at CHEM Trust, a charity that works at UK, European and International level in order to prevent man-made chemicals from causing long term damage to wildlife and humans, have recently published a new briefing that examines this issue.

We submitted this briefing to the European Commission’s recent consultation on the Circular Economy, which closed in August.

In our view the only sustainable circular economy is a clean one, where problematic chemicals are designed out of products, and we avoid the re-circulation of hazardous chemicals by accepting that some contaminated materials are just not worth the risk of recycling.

Designing out problematic chemicals

Designing out problematic chemicals sounds simple enough, but one big problem is that it often takes a very long time for research demonstrating problems with a chemical to translate into legal controls.

This means that companies may unknowingly be using chemicals in their products that are soon to be banned – or will be banned before their product is recycled. BPA in thermal paper is one example, there are also lots of issues with unpleasant PVC additives.

Our briefing proposes a number of solutions to this situation, including a speeding up of chemical safety assessment and the need for product designers and manufacturers to stay ahead of the game by using resources such as ChemSec’s “Substitute it Now” (SIN) list to identify new problem chemicals.

Designing out hazardous chemicals from products will not always be easy – particularly when dealing with complex supply chains – however, it is necessary.

Accepting we shouldn’t recycle some products

When it comes to end of life, there is often little that can be done to remove hazardous chemicals, and in our view this means that it is often best not to recycle such materials.

For example, the European Commission is currently debating whether to authorise the use of recycled PVC containing a hormone disrupting chemical called DEHP – we have asked them not to.

Furniture is a major area of concern, both because of its long life (increasing the chance that chemicals may be restricted before it reaches end of life) and because some particularly unpleasant chemicals have been used on furniture (e.g. brominated flame retardants). We are proposing that the European Commission needs to look at furniture in more depth.

We are already hearing of cases where contaminated material is being recycled when it shouldn’t – for example brominated flame retardants have been found in black kitchen plastics.

One key tool for ensuring that recycling processes can be kept clean is better labelling and information flow on the presence of chemicals in products – something that is not effective enough at the moment.

Conclusion

The circular economy will only be successful in the long term if customers – including the public – are confident in the quality of recycled material.

If this confidence is removed, then the market will demand virgin materials, and the attempt to create a circular economy will fail.

When designing a product for circularity it is often difficult to know where to begin. Therefore, to help designers get started and make informed decisions, a Life cycle Analysis (LCA) can be carried out using the information gathered during the research stage.

LCA is a technique to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process, or service. This assessment is exceptionally useful as it shows the designer what areas are the most impactful during the product’s life cycle. For example, the designer might think that the manufacturing stage would be the most impactful, when in reality for some products it’s the raw material extraction or its use phase. It can also help them to compare the newly redesigned product to the original, acting as a benchmark to ensure the design changes are actually positive for the environment.

However, the LCA is not an exact science and has its limitations:
•Uncertainties about the correctness of the model. There is always some level of uncertainty in the results and in the methodology; so users shouldn’t take the numbers shown as absolute values, but more as a guide to prioritise work. Not all form of impacts are valued the same, so the ones with the largest impact should be tackled first in order to produce the maximum overall improvement.
•Data Uncertainty. Gathering all the data for the LCA is the most difficult part of the task, and normally assumptions have to be made where it’s impossible to gather all the knowledge required, thus not all the relevant impacts are considered. In this case it’s much harder for me to carry out an LCA on a Gillette razor than if Gillette did the LCA themselves, as they would have all the correct info required first-hand (reducing the number of assumptions needing to be used).

Eco-Indicator Assessment

The Eco-Indicator method is a tool developed to help designers conduct a simplified LCA study. The advantage of using this method compared to a more comprehensive LCA method is that it’s much simpler to carry out and to gather the required information because the data regarding the most common materials and processes has been collected in advance. This makes it an easy and quick method to start the analysis of a product and aid the designer when creating alternative concepts which are more environmentally friendly, because they can clearly identify what areas need improvement and which ones work well already. Another advantage is that the process produces a single score (Eco-Indicator Point) for the all the impacts of the product, not just individual ones for each part. These are the reasons why I will carry out an Eco-Indicator Assessment instead of a full LCA.

In order to carry out the Eco-Indicator analysis method, the methodology described below has to be followed:
1.Establish the purpose of the Eco-Indicator calculations
2.Define the life-cycle
3.Quantify the materials and processes
4.Complete the form
5.Interpret and analyse the results

In this post I haven’t shown the whole process, but there are downloadable links to my full Eco-Indicator results, and to the template form if you’d like to carry out an assessment yourself.

1. The purpose of this assessment is to compare two different types of razors: cartridge based vs. double edge safety razor.

These results will then be used to inform the design process and improve the redesigned razor. Finally, the assessment will be carried out on the new design to assess if it has a lower impact than the other options analysed.

In this section we also need to state the assumptions made during the process:
•The blades and lubricating strip were too light to be measured with our equipment so their weights were rounded to 1g.
•The Eco-Indicator for EPDM rubber includes the manufacturing of the rubber as well as the molding process.
•The tables didn’t contain values for welding steel, so it has been assumed that the value is close to welding aluminium which is in the table.
•It has been assumed that the only part recycled at the end of life is the packaging.
•It has been assumed that the packaging contains cardboard, even though it has been made from other natural fibres like bamboo, as there is no info on those materials in the Eco-Indicator tables.
•The product doesn’t contain any material labels, so the materials have been assumed to be low alloy steel for the body, PP for the plastic parts of the body, EPDM rubber for the grip and an acrylic polymer coating for the lubricating band.

2. Define the Life-cycle – This is an example of a simple product life-cycle diagram. In this case it’s the life-cycle of the cartridge-based razor.

3. Interpretation of results – The last step in the process is to interpret the results and compare them against each other.

The hardest part of this whole process is the data gathering. In this case it was very difficult to see what materials the product contained and exactly how it was manufactured (as the big manufacturing companies wouldn’t disclose this information), so some of the data had to be assumed. This obviously makes the results less accurate, but it can still be used as a general indicator of impact.

The final value for the cartridge-based razor was 115.06 mPt, and the value for the double edge safety razor was 15.70 mPt. The biggest impact during the cartridge-based razor life-cycle is manufacturing the cartridge as this is the part which is hardest to make. In landfilling or incinerating this part, the large amount of energy and material value used in creating it is lost. By far, the biggest impact during the manufacturing of the razors was the 17 spot welds done in each cartridge.

We can see how the double edge safety razor has a much lower impact due to the low amount of parts and materials used and the fact that the blade can be separated from the rest of the body and recycled (reducing the overall impact of the product).

The body of both razors had similar impact as their weights were also quite similar. The cartridge-based razor had a slightly higher impact due to the rubber parts which can’t be separated from the plastic body.

Now that we understand the key challenges with the razors, and where the biggest impacts are occurring, we can begin to make informed decisions in the redesign. My next blog post will show some design recommendations using sketches and 3D-printed prototypes.

This project is a collaboration between the Great Recovery Programme and Fab Lab London.

Razor Teardown

Tearing down a product is an illuminating process for the designer in search of circularity. It is an excellent way to analyse a current product and identify key information about its production: how many materials and parts it is made from, and how these parts are assembled.

Leading on from this, and vitally important for circularity, it enables a prediction to be made about what will happen to the product when it reaches its end of life and enters our waste system.

To be recycled effectively, materials needs to be separated. A product that is difficult to disassemble, either by hand or mechanically (shredding), is unlikely to make it into a recycling stream and much more likely to be landfilled or incinerated. Its valuable materials lost.

You will see in the disassembly pictures below that all the razors were hard to separate manually. The cheapest, a disposable BIC, couldn’t even be separated without breaking it.

The reason for this? Products are created by designers and engineers seeking to solve the brief they have been given. For fast moving consumer goods such as the razor, this often means creating a product which combines the demands of high performance, low price and high speed. With these emphases it is unsurprising that difficult disassembly is a by-product.

On the other hand, if the razors are going to be shredded and then the pieces of materials separated, the product wouldn’t need to be designed for easy disassembly, which could be the reason why the BIC razor is attached together the way it is.

This means that razors don’t have to be designed the way they are, their design would be quite different if circularity was included in the brief since the beginning. We will use the problems encountered during the disassembly stage, and convert them into design challenges in order to improve our final design of the razor.

Possible solutions for the disassembly problems:
•Minimise the number of parts – instead of using 26 different parts.
•Minimise the number of materials – best option could be to use just one material which is fully recyclable at its End of Life without being downcycled.
•The impact created by the manufacturing method, and the difficulty in separating the materials at the waste management site would be considerably reduced if the blades were attached by snap fits or push fits instead of being spot welded 17 times each. One reason why these cartridges can’t be recycled is because the metal strips are so thin and stuck together that separating them would be labour and cost intensive.
•Labelling the materials would make it easier for customers to know where the razor should be thrown (so it can get recycled) and easier to sort the materials and parts out at its End of Life by the waste manager.

The best product in terms of circularity out of the ones analysed is the classic double edge safety razor. It contains a minimum number of materials and parts which can be disassembled in under a minute without any tools (just by hand). The blade is easy to access and replace, so the body can be kept for a long time instead of getting thrown away. This version wouldn’t probably last as long due to the cheap materials used but a metallic one would last for a lifetime. Finally the blade can be recycled so this product wouldn’t make as much impact as the cartridge-based razors (or we’ll find out during the Life Cycle Assessment).

The tearing down process of these razors has confirmed for me the need for our new design to be made in a way which is easy to assemble at manufacture and at the same time easy to disassemble at the end of life, in order to increase recycling efficiency and also to make it easier to repair and extend the products lifetime.

This project is a collaboration between the Great Recovery Programme and Fab Lab London.

As discussed in our first blog, the main reason we chose to redesign disposable razors is that they can’t be easily recycled. It’s difficult and can be dangerous to separate the blade from the rest of the product, and is not economic to do so in terms of labour costs. It is also most likely that they end up in black bin bag waste along with other non-recyclables, ultimately ending their life in incineration or landfill.

In order to carry out our research, we bought various different types of razors from a chemist, varying in quality and price. These were then broken down to analyse the materials used, number of parts, amount of materials, weight, and ease of disassembly.

Customer Research

We carried out customer research to understand people’s motivation for buying one type of razor as opposed to another.

Whilst customers focus most on economic factors – the price of the razor – they do also think about quality. Customers often don’t realise the number of available options outside of their local store or pharmacy, which include double-edge safety razors for example where 100 blades can be bought for as little as £4, compared to buying 4 cartridges for £15 .

The problem these users encounter is that they use the razor cartridges for much longer than they should in order to save money, but at the expense of their skin – as when the razor gets dull it produces tugging and irritation.

The way razor companies deal with this is by selling shaving gel, and adding numbing agent chemicals  so it doesn’t hurt you as much when the razor tugs. These chemicals are not good for long term use and can cause premature aging and drying. Even the synthetic colour and scent of the cream can cause irritation.

If men (and for the purposes of this project we have focused mostly on men) had a larger offer of different products – for example old school double edge safety razors, instead of the same product manufactured by different brands, they might discover that there are cheaper and potentially healthier options available.

Interview with Waste Manager (Regis Road Recycling Camden) + Barber (Murdock London)

Last Friday we hosted our second Fab Friday event at Fab Lab London. Excitingly, our participants represented a vibrant cross-section of the Circular Network: from plumbers to architects, university lecturers to graphic designers, biomimicry students to social justice entrepreneurs.

With so much cross-sectional expertise in one room, we wanted to ensure that our visitors benefited from mutual insights and discussion as much as they did from an introduction to the RSA Great Recovery, Fab Lab London and the circular economy. Using pink and yellow post-it notes, a blank wall, and Andrea’s Affinity Diagram model, we soon built up a virtual picture of the shared skills and interests in the room. One man thought that plumbing wasn’t very relevant to a circular economy, but it soon emerged that he had incredible knowledge of the interrelated systems within a building (rather like the materials systems on our planet, then!) – not to mention the practical skills that are eminently transferable in a Fab Lab context. Another lady, who had been a textiles designer for many years, announced that she had never considered where her materials came from before – let alone what happened to them after use – and started to come up with new ideas and questions.

Into the midst of this thrown-together network, Fab Lab’s Andrea Coens introduced some practical and simple ways in which she had used Fab Lab’s facilities to extend the life of some of her things – tying in perfectly with The Great Recovery’s inner-loop design model around longevity.

There was a camera tripod, which we decided was made from steel, aluminium, plastic, rubber and brass, probably imported from or via Taiwan, China, Australia, Iceland and the Middle East, and which had a broken part in the neck. Several other people in the room owned tripods – many of which hadn’t been used for upwards of ten or even twenty years – and when we talked about what would usually happen to these in the event of a broken part, responses ranged from ‘charity shop’ or ‘husband for repair’ to local dump, dustbin and ‘no idea’! In Andrea’s case, she had used a micrometer to measure the broken part precisely, had designed a new part using CAD software – actually improving the original design in the process by lengthening the threaded section to give it more strength – and then had 3D printed it at the Fab Lab.

Not only that, but she had then uploaded her new design to the website Thingiverse, an open source Creative Commons repository of designs for 3D printing, making it free for all to use and share. Within a couple of weeks, 16 other people had downloaded her design!

Andrea also showed us her ‘Fitbit’, a device for measuring steps and calories – fitness – and which had a small design fault in its attachment. Using Thingiverse again, Andrea had downloaded a ready-made design, printed it out in around 15 minutes, and instantly solved a problem which, though small, could have led to the product itself being wasted prematurely.

By the end of the afternoon, our participants had been introduced to the work of the Great Recovery, seen for themselves the potential of the Fab Lab (3D printing is merely one out of a myriad of tools and machines), and shared their own stories, ideas and challenges (not to mention business cards and email addresses.) One of them even got stuck straight in with a soldering job!

We are delighted to say that everyone had a fabulous and informative time – and we look forward to seeing even more of you next time!