Innovation Design 2/4
just two knitted pieces in them, rather than the 37 pieces in the Air Pegasus. It also makes football shirts made from recycled plastic bottles
But from ships to artificial hips and from toner cartridges to tower cranes, increased sustainability can be designed in to products.
“If you look at sustainability today, it is an old paradigm,” says Ramon Arratia, sustainability director for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India at carpet maker InterfaceFLOR.
“People are trying to make their com- panies more sustainable but that is not what matters – it is the impact of prod- ucts that matters.”
And designers are increasingly focused on this, according to Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability at product design and innovation company Seymourpowell. “There has been a move from clean production – making the same product but in a more sustainable way by, for example, changing the materials you use or the manufacturing process – to a commitment to building new, green products.”
He cites companies such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, GE and Philips, which
have massively increased their commit- ment to research and development on new green products. A few years ago, sustainability was at best hidden and at worst simply not part of design briefs, but now clients are asking for the issue to be highlighted, he adds. The most important issues are energy and low carbon, resource and material use and waste. “Design is crucial to the environmental performance because 80% of the impacts of products are determined in the early design stages,” Sherwin says. The first step to making design changes is to determine where in the value chain the biggest impacts of a product lie. This differs hugely from product to product, meaning that the changes that you need to make are very different, too. Carpet-maker InterfaceFLOR, which is aiming for a “zero environmental footprint” by 2020, discovered that 70% of its impact comes from its raw materials, according to Arratia.
“Most of our impact is in making nylon, which is hard to hear for a carpet company because it’s what makes a carpet a carpet.” To reduce the company’s carbon footprint, “we started with a life-cycle analysis (LCA). The LCA gives purpose to design so the designers know what to focus on,” he adds.
The company’s response to the challenge has included using recycled nylon, recycling old tiles into new products, designing new tiles products that reduce the need for adhesive or use less yarn and creating new designs for tiles using the concept of biomimicry. These random designs reduce waste by up to half because tiles do not need to be placed in a particular order.
Coca-Cola Enterprises, the biggest maker and distributor of the soft drink in Europe, found that 48% of its carbon emissions came from packaging, while for an electric kettle, the overwhelming majority of emissions are associated with consumer use.
“People always overfill their kettles
determined in the early design stages
Design is crucial to the environmental performance because 80% of the impacts of products are
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