Environmental Impact and Sustainability in Design & Technology

Design & Technology students often evaluate products in terms of environmental impact and sustainability. When doing so, students should consider the effect of the environment on the product (this might involve site-specific factors, such as sun exposure, wind patterns, temperature fluctuations, noise levels, and so on) as well as the product’s impact on the environment. The aim of this analysis is to help identify ways that designers can minimise negative environmental impacts and reduce non-renewable resource consumption throughout a product’s lifecycle.

What does sustainability mean?

Sustainability means living in ways that don’t harm the environment or exhaust natural resources, so that both current and future generations have the resources needed to live healthy lives.

“…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

– World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987)

What are the 6Rs of sustainable design?

The 6Rs are principles of sustainable design and consumption: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refuse, Rethink, and Repair. These principles provide a framework for minimising environmental impact and creating more sustainable products, services, and behaviours from initial design through to end-of-life.

• Reduce: Minimizing consumption and waste by buying and using less. This includes choosing products with minimal packaging, buying only what you need, and being mindful of resource usage like water and electricity.
• Reuse: Extending the life of items by using them multiple times or finding new purposes for them. Examples include using reusable shopping bags, water bottles, and containers, or repurposing glass jars for storage.
• Recycle: Converting waste materials into new products by processing them – ensuring that fewer raw materials are used. This involves properly sorting recyclable materials like paper, plastic, glass, and metal, and ensuring they enter the appropriate recycling streams.
• Refuse: Declining items that you don’t need, particularly single-use items and excessive packaging. This might mean saying no to plastic bags, promotional items, or unnecessary purchases.
• Rethink: Reconsidering consumption habits and finding more sustainable alternatives. This involves questioning whether purchases are necessary and exploring more environmentally friendly options.
• Repair: Fixing items instead of replacing them, which extends their lifespan and reduces waste. This can include mending clothes, repairing appliances, or maintaining items to prevent damage.

Which materials can be recycled many times without losing quality?

Some materials can be recycled almost infinitely with minimal loss of quality.

• Glass can be recycled endlessly without any degradation in quality or purity. When cleaned, crushed, and melted, it maintains its properties and can be reformed into new glass products repeatedly. Crushed glass can also be used as an aggregate in the construction industry (i.e. in concrete mixes etc)
• Aluminium, steel, copper, brass, gold and other metals can be recycled over and over without losing their strength or quality. The recycling process involves melting and reforming the metal without degrading its fundamental properties.

The environmental impact of plastic

• Plastic degrades very slowly
• Burning can release toxic fumes
• Thermoplastics (plastics that soften when heated) can be remelted and used, however the plastic generally degrades in quality with each recycling cycle and can only be recycled a limited number of times before becoming unusable
• Thermoset plastics (those that won’t remelt / reform) can sometimes be ground up and used as a filler in other composite products, such as concrete, asphalt, or other building materials
• Recycling plastic is difficult because:
  • It is challenging to make an automated system that can sort plastic into the different types, so it is labour intensive
  • Plastic items (i.e. cell phones) often have many small parts, made from different types of plastic) and the cost of separating the parts often outweighs the recycling value
  • Some plastics are unprofitable to recycle (i.e. polystyrene)

Learn more about different types of plastic here.

Recycling paper and cardboard

• Paper fibres can typically only be recycled 5-7 times before becoming too short and weak to be used again
• Recycling causes paper fibres to break down, so each time the quality degrades
• Used paper is pulped and often combined with pulp from new wood to strengthen it
• Recycled paper intended for printing grade or other white paper must be de-inked, so not contaminated by dye
• Other recycled paper is used for boxes and coarse papers
• Papers that are coated with plastic, aluminium foil, wax or paste cannot be recycled because the process is too expensive
• Glossy inserts are sometimes not recyclable
• Gift-wrap cannot be recycled because it is already low quality

Learn more about different types of paper and cardboard here.

Recycling Batteries

• Batteries contain toxic heavy metals (including lead, mercury, cadmium, nickel) which can harm the environment if not properly disposed of, making recycling critical
• Different battery types (lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, lead-acid, alkaline, etc) require different recycling processes and careful sorting, which complicates recycling systems
• While rechargeable batteries reduce waste by replacing multiple single-use batteries, they still require recycling at end-of-life to recover valuable materials and prevent toxic materials from entering landfills

Problems with recycling

• Sometimes not cost effective – cheaper to just use ‘virgin’ products
• Often not economically viable, i.e. cardboard packaging for food products is more easily recycled than plastic, but is heavier to ship and may result more waste from spoilage
• Recycled products sometimes not appropriate, particularly for packaging of food, toiletries and cosmetics (if these come into direct contact with the card they can become tainted / contaminated). Solutions:
  • Card could be given a plastic or foil coating
  • Secondary packaging could be used (i.e. a plastic bag inside a card cereal box)
• Many products not designed with recycling in mind
• Many items are discarded in a dirty state and contaminated by residue from the original contents
• Recycling plants typically require a lot of space
• Manual sorting of rubbish can be messy and labour intensive

Product labelling helps to indicate which products can be recycled, and which products contain recycled material (see recycling symbols).

Closed-loop systems

Closed-Loop Systems are systems where materials can be continuously recycled or reused, though this is often an ideal rather than a fully achievable reality.

For example, on a sustainable farm the manure from the animals helps to fertilise the soil, which helps to grow the animals…so the waste from one part of the system is used by another part of the system.

Energy use in product design

Products can use many forms of energy including:

• Electrical – lighting systems, electrical motors, solar panels)
• Kinetic (energy generated from movement) – wind turbines, water wheels, pendulum clocks, pedals, hand cranks and other simple mechanism)
• Potential (stored energy) – coiled springs, compressed air, elevated water, stretched elastic bands
• Thermal (heat) – wood-burning stoves, heat pipes, thermal mass materials such as concrete and stone that absorb heat from the sun during the day and release it at night
• Chemical (energy released during chemical reactions) – batteries, biofuels derived from plant materials, photosensitive materials that change properties with light exposure

Mechanisms or devices that convert one form of energy to another

• Motors convert electrical energy into kinetic energy that can carry out some function (electric motors in appliances, fans, electric vehicles, power tools)
• Engines typically convert thermal or chemical energy into through combustion (i.e. combustion engines in cars, diesel engines, jet engines, steam engines)
• Machines transmit or modify force or motion to perform work. Machines typically have multiple components working together to transform energy from one form to another or to change the direction, magnitude, or point of application of a force. For example, a wind turbine has multiple components which transforms energy from one form to another (converting wind’s kinetic energy into mechanical rotation and then into electrical energy):
  • Kinetic energy from moving air turns the blades
  • The rotating blades turn a shaft (often a gearbox increases the rotational speed)
  • The shaft is connected to a generator
  • Inside the generator magnets rotate around wire, or electromagnets spin inside wire coils
  • As the magnets move past the wire, they create a changing magnetic field, induces voltage in the coils causing electrons to flow through the wire (electricity)

Energy sources

Designers should be aware that some energy sources are finite (run out) and others are renewable and should aim to make design choices that conserve energy.

• Renewable energy sources: solar, wind, water etc.
• Finite energy sources: fossil fuels (such as oil, natural gas, coal), nuclear energy (primarily uses uranium as fuel, which exists in finite quantities in the Earth’s crust)

Many governments around the world are prioritising the use of renewable energy sources.

Thanks to windy coastlines and shallow seabed, the UK has led the development of offshore wind. World-leading research and testing capabilities has enabled us to develop several of the world’s largest offshore wind farms, as well as floating turbine technology which allows wind farms to be developed in deeper waters.

– Energy UK, Electricity Generation (2023)

Life-cycle Assessment

Many companies carry out a life-cycle assessment (LCA) looking at how energy use across the life of a product. This is a big-picture analysis considering energy consumption, raw material extraction, carbon emissions, and pollution across the whole product lifecycle, with the aim of minimising environmental impact. This can involve attributing a percentage to each stage of the lifecycle, so that it is clear which life-cycle stages have the greatest impact on the environment.

How to evaluate environmental impact and sustainability

The following list of questions guides students through evaluating a product in terms of environmental impact and sustainability.

Site, location, and surrounding environment

• Where is the product currently located? Is this a typical location for the product? Is it permanently positioned in one location, or can it be moved? Is it constantly moving?
• What impact does the surrounding impact have upon the product? (Consider sunshine angles, shadows, overheating, cool and damp areas, noise from neighbouring environments, and so on.)
• Can the product be adjusted or adapt to changes in the external environment? (Such as by opening windows, erecting sunshades, or opening ventilation panels, raising flood barriers, activating heating/cooling systems, or implementing seasonal modifications).
• Are there any nearby, readily available materials or energy sources that can be utilised within the product?

Conservation of Resources / Minimising waste

• Are the materials renewable (such as sustainably harvested timber, bamboo or cork – which come from trees/plants that can be regrown – or natural fibres such as cotton or wool)? What advantage does this have? (Consider not the advantage of helping the environment, but in being able to promote a sustainable image to potential customers.)
• Could existing materials be substituted for more eco-friendly alternatives – including recycled materials, reducing the use of fresh raw materials? Would this affect the cost or function of the product?
• Can the volume of material used be reduced, such as by reducing packaging, or designing nets/developments to fit neatly into sheets of materials?

Energy use

• What type of energy forms are used during different stages of the product life cycle (production, use, maintenance, and disposal)?
• Does it use renewable energy sources?
• Does the product convert one form of energy to another?
• How might this use of energy be made more efficient or environmentally friendly?
• Could the manufacturing processes be modified to reduce environmental impact? Could the product be designed to require fewer production steps or simpler manufacturing techniques?
• Can the energy used during shipping be reduced by using local materials, or by improving stackability so the product takes up less space in shipping containers?
  When designing a product designers should consider the use of energy at all stages of the product lifecycle (during production, use, and at the end of the life cycle).
• Can the manufacturing process be reduced or made more efficient so that less energy is used?

Biodegradability

• Are materials easily degradable or recyclable? Can they decompose safely without harming the environment? Is there room for improvement in these areas? Can offcuts or byproducts be utilised or disposed of in an environmentally friendly way?

Recycling

• Does the product involve raw material extraction, or recycled materials?
• Does the product contain any recycling symbols? What do these mean?
• Is the product easily disassembled into parts for recycling and reuse? Is there room for improvement in this area? Have you tried to disassemble the product?
• Are any materials laminated or joined to others in such a way that they cannot be separated for recycling?
• Could the product be altered so as to encourage a closed-loop system?

Pollution and toxins

• Does the product useful harmful inks, solvents, or other chemical treatments, toxins, or surface finishes that might pollute the environment?

Longevity

• How long does the product typically last?
• Can the product be easily repaired? Are such products usually repaired or replaced? Does it require experts to do so? Is it possible to easily source replacement parts?
• Could the product be designed to be modular, allowing components to be upgraded rather than replacing the entire product?
• Is there opportunity to make the product last longer, or would a longer lifespan not be suitable?
• Is your product designed with built in obsolescence?
• Is the design future-proof? How adaptable is the product to future technological or lifestyle changes?
• Does the product anticipate future environmental regulations or standards?

User behavior and education

• Does the product encourage sustainable user behavior through its design? How intuitive is the product’s sustainable use? Do users need special knowledge to use it in an environmentally responsible way?
• Does the company currently promote sustainability as a strength of the product?