I’m relatively new to hacking or so I thought until I cast my mind back to what I used to do as a kid. Whenever I would get a toy I would always dismantle it to see how it worked. Looks like I’ve still got the bug! The purpose of this exercise was to have a bit of fun dismantling a printer without breaking the components, with the aim of salvaging some of them for use in other projects. “A lot of the fun is in dismantling without damaging the parts”

It took me 75 minutes altogether to take the printer apart with a Torx screwdriver set and some mole grips. During the teardown, I took some safety precautions by donning a pair of safety goggles. You never know where fragments can fly so it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

The main components I salvaged from the tear down were two motors, these were a C904560001 and a C9000 60005. A quick Google search on these two part numbers brought up a lot of information. It turns out that refurbished motors are worth about £20.

Other components that I managed to reclaim were assorted fasteners, plastic gears, springs, and stainless steel rods in various diameters. Further components could have been extracted from the circuit boards such as micro switches, but further work would be required and time versus parts value was a consideration at this point.

However the overwhelming majority of the printer was made out of a plastic called ABS, as is the case in a large proportion of consumer electronics. The question I wanted to know is can this material be recycled for use as ABS filament which is currently used in 3D printing?

So, I visited the Omnidynamics stand at the TCT + personalize show 2014. The clever team at Omnidynamics have invented a machine called a Stooder that produces ABS filament from ABS pellets. This machine reduces the cost of buying 3d filament by 80% and has been designed as a compact and easy to use device for the home, schools and businesses. They are also aiming to invent an add-on recycler unit which would turn household plastic waste, into filament. Perhaps in the future, we will see the ABS casings from consumer electronics, like the printer, recycled into ABS filament and be 3d printed to create a new product, in our homes!

After some introductions and background on our subject from Sholeh from Julie’s Bicycle and Lucy from The Great Recovery, Nick Cliffe took to the floor to explain what Closed Loop were all about. So fascinated were our crowd that our tour began very late, but once clad in stylish pink hi-vis and white hard hats, we began our journey.

It was really interesting to discover the many interesting by-products from the bottle recycling process. The one that received the most attention from the cameras was the strange hot goo that appeared from the bottom of one machine, which was producing rHDPE pellets. It rapidly created an abstract pile of gunge on the floor. Alarmed, we informed Nick of the leakage, but he assured us this was totally normal. It sets very quickly and is transferred into a container. Along our tour we saw many mountains of plastic flakes, the pure milk bottle ones sparkled like jewels and the coloured bottle top ones went some to revealing the popularity of the different milk varieties; semi-skimmed came out on top.

Visiting the factory certainly did make us realise why recycling plastic back to food grade level is so rare. The process of splitting the original product down to a pure safe form was extensive, with six different processes to complete before the plastic is ready to start its new life. These include optical sorting using infra-red beams, purification which removes the outa layer of the broken down plastic, and a final quality assurance test in the laboratory.

Back in the safety of the office, we heard about Closed Loop’s latest business venture with plastic manufacturer Coveris. They have invented 50% rPET cups which they are aiming to introduce into the sports and hospitality sectors, this scheme guarantees that they are recycled at Closed Loop and reduces CO2 emissions as distance travelled by the cups are reduced. As we heard at our plastics conference earlier in the week, the biggest challenge for this sustainable business idea is making it economically viable and kick-starting the market, but it’s a case of chicken and egg. The more people use recycled goods, the cheaper they will become, and therefore the more economically viable.

Then we got active and angry taking apart some plastic products. In one bottle with a spray top, we found some hidden metal parts, which would have contaminated the rest of its batch had it entered the recycling process. We talked about how unnecessary so many plastic products are, and the attitudes and alternatives that need to be found. Using Nat’s four circular economy design models we brainstormed some of these alternatives. What if there was a door to door service that would take away the packaging we gain from online shopping deliveries? What if there was an organised supply and demand system in shops to reduce the over supplying of goods? Could we wrap new clothes in old clothes as their packaging?

Exhausted from the huge amount of thinking we had done that day, we reflected for a few minutes before ending by telling the group what one personal action we would take to tackle plastic waste; These included interrogating the recycling rules given by our councils, looking at the amount of packaging on our product before we buy it, and watching the documentary film ‘Trashed’ that reveals the worrying reality of plastic pollution.

As we hoped it would, the day sparked huge amounts of passion from our attendees and some great ideas too. If you would like to get involved in one of our workshops with Julie’s bicycle, there are plenty more to come.

The spudgers were out and all over the room mobile phones were being prised, prodded and pulled to bits. 50 heads were bent over in concentration. The Great Recovery was at another e-waste teardown. But instead of the professional designers, material scientists, brand managers and manufacturers that we are used to working with, todays audience was made up of 16 & 17 year old students studying for their A levels.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a brilliant day at St Johns School in Marlborough, an internationally renowned Academy who lists “an emphasis on… developing care for the environment” as one of their key aims. This was clearly being fulfilled during the Great Recovery Learning Day, the brainchild of D&T Teacher & STEM Co-ordinator Gary England. After taking part in a Great Recovery tear down at an Opening Minds day at the RSA in October 2012, Gary, who had been teaching recycling and environmental responsibility within his subject for years, came across statistics and facts around material scarcity and the circular economy that were new to him, and he was shocked that this wasn’t a) public knowledge and b) being taught as a key part of the curriculum. Taking this new-found knowledge and the idea of using teardowns as an educational tool, Gary took this idea back to St Johns, and set to work planning an entire day dedicated to the circular economy.

Following a morning of teardowns, around 50 students from product design, business studies, chemistry, environmental sciences and geography came together to learn about the problems our linear economy was creating, both economically, socially and environmentally, and what could be done to move towards circular systems. Using a collection of online resources compiled by Mr England, the students worked in groups to put together 10 minute presentations of their learning’s, as well as their own suggestions on how we can move towards a circular economy.

As we have discovered through the past 9 months of the Great Recovery Project, the circular economy is not a simple subject, and to digest this in one day would be incredibly challenging. By exploring the complex subject through just one object – in this instance a mobile phone, something that plays a central role in the lives of young people – it acted as a tangible platform for the students to understand and explore all aspects around the circular economy. As a result, the presentations delivered by the youngsters showed an incredible level of understanding. While at 10am I was met with “I don’t know what the circular economy is”, by 3pm the students were able to talk through our different models of circular design more eloquently than I have ever been able to!

Following the successful day-long project, St Johns now have plans to make this an annual event, as well as rolling it out across the school by enlisting the 6^th formers to teach the lower years about the circular economy, and explore how some of the ideas can be put into practise within the school. I really hope that this fantastic event inspired and enlightened the students, and they are able to develop their ideas and continue learning about the circular economy. After all, it is their generation who will be left with the consequences of our current model, and it is their generation who can empower and enable future change. Surely this is a good argument to bring more circular economy education into our schools and colleges?

With the Ellen MacArthur Foundation currently working with 1600 secondary schools (with an aim to raise this number to 2,200 by September this year) I hope that this circular ‘enlightenment’ among school and further education level students is going to become an every day occurrence (as supposed to a one off inspiring day out of the office for me!)

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

Our first workshop, in Geevor Tin Mine, Cornwall. Seeing how tin is dug up out of the ground and how it’s used in products.

RSA workshop at S2S Electronics, 2012. S2S refurbish electronics in a really sane way – many e-waste recovery centres crush the whole product, then sort, but S2S repair and refurbish, or take apart by hand those items that can’t be fixed.

We take apart products to see what’s inside, then redesign them for a circular economy.

Yesterday I dismembered an electric toothbrush. Literally smashed it to pieces and tried to separate it into its component parts. In fact it took four of us to do it, wielding outsize cutters and other weapons not found in the average DIY toolbox. It wasn’t my toothbrush but I have one very similar.

It was a shocking experience. Why?

Well firstly, obviously, this is an item built never to be dismantled. It combines plastics and metals in a form which can only follow a linear path from earth to earth – from mines and oil wells, through a brief visit to someone’s home, back to a landfill site. Apparently for it to be economic to dismantle an item of this value manually, it needs to be doable in 7 seconds. It took the four of us nearly an hour! If we end up with 9Bn people, and everyone has one of these which lasts for say 2 years, that’s 4.5Bn toothbrushes every year added to the landfill pile, with all the old ones still sitting there for years to come.

Secondly, the spurious functionality. I could imagine the box this came in, with those little bullet points on the outside we love to compare – how many speeds, special “action” of some kind, timers, LCD displays, etc etc. Even if an electric toothbrush with a rotating head does clean teeth better than a manual brush (I’ll come back to that question), the rest is just a way of “out-claiming” the essentially identical toothbrush in the next box along the Boots shelf. Is this consumer choice, in any useful form? And the price of that is a ludicrously complex design, with a large circuit board packed with rare earths. Even the outer casing had plastic, rubber, and metallic elements to make the device look like a miniature spaceship, which somebody must, bizarrely, have described as a design – we all “need” a spaceship in our bathrooms, clearly!

Thirdly, the price of being obsessed with human safety. The design was of course driven by regulations around electrical safety in a bathroom. So it has an induction charger, transformer, and some of the electrical components are embedded in a kind of plastic goo which had been squirted into the casing after assembly, like the gel around the meat in a pork pie. Great for insulation, terrible for recycling, and a lazy piece of design because a better designed casing would do the same job. So – no electrocutions but a big pile of waste.

Finally, the sheer force required to break this thing to pieces. One of the cutters we used ended up with a dented blade as we took on the NASA-grade axle that rotates that little plastic head in your mouth. So a supremely simple manual task (brushing one’s teeth) is subject to all the brute force we can apply – in mining and drilling, refining and smelting, moulding and machining, assembling and packaging, up to this end of crushing and tearing. An elegant engineering solution to clean teeth this is not. If a rotating head cleans teeth better, couldn’t we just learn to twist our arm a little as we brush?

Why was I doing this? I was at the Closed Loop recycling centre in Essex, at a workshop held as part of the RSA / TSB sponsored project “The Great Recovery.” This is trying to foster collaboration to drive “circular supply chains,” where re-use and recycling are taken to an entirely new level, so that minimal resources need to be extracted, and minimal waste returns to the earth as landfill.

Impressive as the Closed Loop facility is, it strikes me as more of that almost obscene force – huge machines trying to convert our waste (packaging in this case) back into something we can use. This is literally entropy in action – you can see, feel, and hear the energy required to create the order of pure materials out of the disorder of the waste.

So in pursuing this work we need to be mindful of the waste hierarchy – if we can reduce and re-use that is so much better than even the most sophisticated recycling. The challenge is to make that work as a business model. The toothbrush company would not remotely match its current profits making conventional toothbrushes. And it’s tough from a consumer point of view too. That little arm twist, that would match the brushing performance of the rotating brush, is, like all habits, not easily made habitual. At the very least it is expensive even to try to teach consumers such habit changes – and why would the toothbrush manufacturer do that when they only have the profit from simple manual toothbrushes to look forward to?

So the real innovation needed is in the deepest rethinking of brands. Utilities face the startling challenge of having to make more money by selling less electricity and water. Likewise branded goods manufacturers have to develop new relationships with consumers in which they can make profits out of people’s genuine wellbeing, but not by brute force solutions involving lots of physical stuff. Can I prove that down this route lies continuing profit growth – no I can’t, no-one can – but ultimately the toothbrush mountain will keep getting bigger and sooner or later that will bounce back as increased cost or regulation. When that happens the winners will be those already prepared – well established in markets of more genuine value to consumers and society.

An interesting factoid from the day was that Lego have no intention of making their toy bricks recyclable – because they have remained usable and completely interchangeable since 1958. They never need to be thrown away – if you’re too old to play with them simply pass them on. Supposing some products, and a lot of components within products, could be regarded as “good enough” so that they remain standard, are shared and reused, and not constantly redesigned? Maybe every child aged 5 should get a prized present – a free electric toothbrush, so well made that it lasts a whole human life, and the toothbrush company makes it’s money out of 100% recyclable brushes. But these considerations aren’t easy – the Apple gadget I’m writing on is apparently appallingly hard to recycle, but by having continual free software upgrades I’ve kept it far longer than my last computer. I don’t know if that makes it “a good thing” or if there is a better alternative.

All this brings challenges for business models and supply chains. Businesses will make more money from services and less from products, and even the products may be rented to consumers rather than sold. Supply chains will be far more focused on multiple cycles of interaction with the consumer, rather than a single one-time flow from a source to a destination – so they will need to be more decentralised, reversing the trend of the last 30 years.

And (as you would expect on this blog!) this is hugely about leadership. There are serious discontinuities in business practice here, taking one set of risks to prevent the impact of another set. What I did like about Closed Loop was the kind of considered pragmatism of their work – making a significant investment in a recycling facility which is the right thing now, even if in the long run it may be rendered redundant by increased re-use, or by better consumer segregation of their own waste. There are few opportunities to invest in a guaranteed future, and it is a huge mistake to think that, even by brilliant total systems thinking, such certainty will suddenly emerge in the sustainability field. On the contrary this is about pragmatism and flexibility, coupled with the courage to move forward in considered stages when the time is right. I haven’t met Closed Loop’s corporate leaders, but it seems they have their heads screwed on.

So what about my own toothbrush? Well now that I have it, I may as well use it until it packs in. Then I think I’ll pick a therapeutic moment to relieve my anger by dismantling it myself and putting as many bits as possible in the right recycling streams. And then I’ll buy a normal toothbrush and try to teach myself that cunning little arm twist that will keep me smiling!

Images by Leonora Oppenheim/The Great Recovery

On Friday 26 October Leap was invited by RSA design directors Sophie Thomas and Nat Hunter to attend the first Great Recovery workshop, held at the Geevor Tin Mine in Pendeen.

The full day workshop started with a fascinating talk by Mike, ex-miner from Geevor, who has been working in mines all over the world since 1979. This was followed by a tour around and in the Geevor Tin Mine, all very impressive in its content. From rising and falling tin prices to surveying difficulties, the impact on workers, families and owners, the daily risks of working in such harsh conditions and much more. Despite my keen interest, being 1.83 meter tall doesn’t make me a natural born miner as I kept hitting my head in the dark. After the tour, the session lead into an examination of the nature of current supply chains, logistics, resource efficiency, waste, and business/technical challenges. Mark Shayler talked in a little more detail about the global supply chain of our electrical goods, and revealed that up to 64% of the world’s Coltan supplies are estimated to come from the Congo. After a provided lunch with Cornish pastries, the focus turned to products and analysis of process. We took apart a video camera. Inside this camera we discovered layers of plastic, metal and circuit boards, all made up of several types of metal, including copper, tin, cobalt and gold. Besides this, I was very intrigued by all the various sizes of springs that were inside the camera.

”Finding new ways to produce these necessary raw materials by questioning every stage of the process, finding fair mines or investing in their creation and recycling our existing raw materials. If we roll out this thinking beyond our devices, and apply it to all of our electronics, questioning where elements have come from and where they will go, we will be one step closer to a circular economy” – The Great Recovery.

It’s time that we all begin to question the products that we are consuming.

It was nice to meet everyone involved and thanks for such an inspiring day!

Marjolein

Photos by Nat Hunter/The Great Recovery

Kenneth said of the day:

“Touring a recycling facility for electrical and electronic waste gave me the opportunity to see what happens to our ‘junk’ at the end of its life; an endless volume of stuff that has to be broken up and processed in order to recover the valuable resources contained within. A group of us took apart a variety of discarded items including a handheld drill and a mobile phone which opened up a lively debate about the responsibilities of designers and manufacturers alike to make things that should be easier for people to dissemble, fix, re-use or dispose of responsibly.

As a designer it is challenging to radically change the way you work without the support of with an enlightened client, manufacturer and consumer. The RSA’s Great Recovery is a timely and ambitious initiative that urgently needs the attention and support of everyone who is responsible for commissioning, designing, making and selling things.”

We will be announcing more Great Recovery workshops early next year.

We took apart an old phone at a FairPhone workshop to try and find out.

Inside a basic old handset, we discovered layers of metal and circuit board, all made up of a huge 35 types of metal, including copper, tin, cobalt and gold. A recent study suggests that one tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield a massive 150 grams.

Digging a little deeper, we discovered that a tiny part of the phone – the capacitor – contains the element Tantalum. The name Tantalum comes from the metal’s unusual quality of repelling liquids, much like Tantalus, a figure in Greek mythology who was forced to stand in a pool of water that remained constantly out of reach when he tried to take a drink. Tantalum can be found in nearly all of our electrical goods – mobile phones, lap tops, hard drives, PlayStations… and the list goes on.

Derived from the metallic ore Coltan, which is mainly found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, its ‘medium risk’ labelling and its rising value has made Tantalum a huge catalyst in the on-going Congo war. A recent report by the UN has claimed that all the parties involved in the local civil war have been involved in the mining and sale of Coltan. In the province of Katanga alone, an estimated 150,000 work in the mines, including 50,000 children and young people, some as young as seven years old.

At this year’s 100% design, Mark Shayler looked in a little more detail at the global supply chain of our electrical goods, and revealed that up to 64% of the world’s Coltan supplies are estimated to come from the Congo. Now think back to those 49 million mobile handsets that are sitting unused around the country. If we were able to recover all of the Tantalum from these, we could make 49 million new mobile handsets that wouldn’t need to rely on a ‘conflict metal’.

FairPhone is working to bring a ‘fair’ smartphone onto the market. This means a phone that is made “entirely out of parts and utilised without harming individuals or the environment.”  They are working to find new ways to produce these necessary raw materials by questioning every stage of the process; finding fair mines (or investing in their creation) and recycling our existing raw materials. If we could roll out this thinking beyond our mobile phones, and apply it to all of our electronics, questioning where elements have come from and where they will go, we will be one step closer to a circular economy.

It’s time that we all begin to question the products that we are consuming. To find out more about e-waste, try your hand at taking a mobile phone apart, and learn how you can make a difference, come to one our e-waste workshops at SWEEEP electronic recovery facility, Kent on the 16^th November, or at S2S in Rotherham on the 21^st November.

Why don’t you take something apart and see what you discover? To contribute to our deconstruction series, contact hilary.chittenden@rsa.org.uk