Designing with recycling and reuse in mind

Plas­tic is a durable mate­r­i­al. For decades, this has been a con­sid­er­able ben­e­fit, allow­ing for the cre­ation of ver­sa­tile, hard-wear­ing prod­ucts that can reach the fur­thest cor­ners of the Earth. But this, of course, has proved dis­as­trous from an envi­ron­men­tal per­spec­tive. 

Accord­ing to the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-oper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment, about 6.3 bil­lion tonnes of plas­tic waste were gen­er­at­ed between 1950 and 2015, of which only 9% was recy­cled. The rest was burnt, put in land­fill or left to lit­ter land and sea. 

If we want a world where con­sumer and indus­tri­al goods don’t end up as pol­lu­tants, busi­ness­es need to be smarter about how they use and, even more cru­cial­ly, reuse plas­tics. That trans­for­ma­tion starts at the cor­po­rate lev­el, with prod­uct design­ers, engi­neers and exec­u­tives agree­ing to pri­ori­tise recy­cled and recy­clable mate­ri­als in their man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es.

Considering a product’s lifecycle

Adi­das is one glob­al brand that’s been review­ing its approach in this respect. Mar­win Hoff­mann, its senior direc­tor of brand sus­tain­abil­i­ty, reports that more than 70% of all the poly­ester used by the com­pa­ny last year was recy­cled. From 2024 onwards, Adi­das is aim­ing to use only recy­cled poly­ester.

Since 2015, the sports­wear giant has col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Par­ley for the Oceans cam­paign to sell “mil­lions of pairs of shoes” made using recy­cled plas­tic waste from coastal regions around the world. In 2020, the project was respon­si­ble for the retrieval of 7,000 tonnes of refuse.

Con­sid­er­a­tions about the end of a product’s life are increas­ing­ly inform­ing the work of the company’s design­ers. For instance, the Ultra­boost DNA Loop shoe, which Adi­das mar­ket­ed for the first time in Octo­ber 2020, is made from one mate­r­i­al, from the sole to the laces, and is weld­ed with­out glue. “Once the shoe reach­es the end of its life, it can be shred­ded to pieces and reused,” Hoff­mann says.

As a major man­u­fac­tur­er, Adi­das is aware of the impact that activ­i­ties in its sup­ply chain can have on the wider indus­try, he adds. “We have worked with sup­pli­ers to cre­ate struc­tures that make it pos­si­ble to process recy­cled mate­ri­als on a large scale. Such com­mit­ment not only makes Adi­das more sus­tain­able; it also dri­ves the whole industry’s devel­op­ment.”

Recycled commodities 

For big com­pa­nies to cre­ate prod­ucts fit for the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my, they first need access to appro­pri­ate mate­ri­als. The Good Plas­tic Com­pa­ny is a sup­pli­er of recy­cled plas­tic that has worked with Nike and Elle, among oth­ers. William Chizhovsky, its founder and CEO, refers to his busi­ness as an “R&D oper­a­tion” – an impor­tant link in the chain between the recy­clers that clean and shred, and the cor­po­ra­tions that make and sell. 

He fore­sees recy­cled plas­tic as a major com­mod­i­ty, one that can act as a viable sub­sti­tute for vir­gin plas­tic and per­haps even wood. But first, costs need to be brought down and process­es ren­dered more effi­cient. To this end, the com­pa­ny hired engi­neer­ing experts to devel­op what Chizhovsky’s col­leagues call “toastie machines”. These heat and press recy­cled plas­tic into sheet­ing of var­i­ous sizes, col­lect­ing valu­able infor­ma­tion in the process. 

“Based on data such as tem­per­a­ture, pres­sure, time and so on, we can devel­op the best recipe for the recy­cling of dif­fer­ent plas­tic types,” he says.

At present, 1m² of sheet­ing is equiv­a­lent to 7,000 plas­tic bags. The com­pa­ny can work with most plas­tics (PVC being one notable excep­tion) and is under­stand­ably keen for man­u­fac­tur­ers to review their choic­es of raw mate­r­i­al. 

“Can you help to recy­cle a few 100 mil­lion tons of plas­tic by sell­ing sun­glass­es?” Chizhovsky says, sug­gest­ing that brands should be more ambi­tious with their designs. “Every­thing that you retail that’s pro­duced from wood or vir­gin plas­tic you can pro­duce from recy­cled plas­tic.”

Although com­pa­nies are increas­ing­ly com­mit­ting to sus­tain­abil­i­ty tar­gets, there is still some hes­i­ta­tion when it comes to recy­cled mate­ri­als, he notes. Buy­ers often expect the mate­ri­als to be cheap­er, while some have even asked him to sup­ply mate­r­i­al that doesn’t look obvi­ous­ly recy­cled, as they “want peo­ple to think it’s vir­gin plas­tic”. 

Changing perceptions, if not production

That dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship between waste and aes­thet­ics par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­ests prod­uct design­er Joost Dinge­mans. At the start of his career he adopt­ed a mantra – “I exist, there­fore I pol­lute” – that sums up the dilem­ma fac­ing many envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious cre­atives: they feel guilty about want­i­ng to carve out the new in a world that’s already packed with prod­ucts. 

Dinge­mans realised that, unless he was work­ing with waste and return­ing val­ue to some­thing unwant­ed, he “couldn’t be hap­py with design­ing and mak­ing”. Along with co-founder Marten van Mid­delkoop, he runs Plas­ti­ci­et, a stu­dio in Rot­ter­dam that takes off­cuts from indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ers and con­verts up to 2 tonnes of this mate­r­i­al into sheets of recy­cled plas­tic each month. 

Because these sheets have an aes­thet­ic val­ue, Plasticiet’s cor­po­rate cus­tomers often put them on dis­play in their shops and offices, rather than using them as mate­ri­als in man­u­fac­tur­ing. The part­ners believe that this prac­tice tends to make their prod­uct more of a virtue sig­nal than an agent of real change. 

“We’re basi­cal­ly help­ing a lot of these retail­ers in their green­wash­ing,” Dinge­mans admits, although he acknowl­edges that any­one vis­it­ing these firms’ premis­es “will see that recy­cled plas­tic exists – that it’s being used, it’s beau­ti­ful, it works”. 

Tips on working with recycled plastics

Dinge­mans and van Mid­delkoop are con­scious­ly design­ing for design­ers. Like the mate­r­i­al sold by the Good Plas­tic Com­pa­ny, their prod­uct has built-in ver­sa­til­i­ty “so that peo­ple can use their cre­ativ­i­ty. There is free­dom in the way you apply it,” Dinge­mans says. Indeed, it’s been used in prod­ucts rang­ing from work­tops to foun­tain pens. 

He adds that one of the biggest chal­lenges for Plas­ti­ci­et has been to find a con­sis­tent­ly reli­able sup­ply of plas­tic waste that’s suf­fi­cient­ly cost-effec­tive to process. Scal­ing pro­duc­tion up to a mean­ing­ful lev­el can be hard if the waste needs a lot of “clean­ing up”. Mix­ing plas­tic with oth­er mate­ri­als – no mat­ter how aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing – is like­ly to make recy­cling far more ardu­ous. On the oth­er hand, an item made from only one type of plas­tic can eas­i­ly be bro­ken down and reassem­bled into some­thing new.

Last­ly, pro­duc­ers should look to edu­cate users about alter­na­tives to dis­card­ing what they no longer need. Plas­ti­ci­et will take any off­cuts sent back by cus­tomers and reuse them, for instance, while Adi­das is pilot­ing a rental ser­vice in France. Cus­tomers can use a range of sports­wear, pay­ing for clothes and shoes accord­ing to the dura­tion of their use. Once an item has been returned, Adi­das will clean and repair it before mak­ing it avail­able again.

These changes are only the start. Accord­ing to the UN, the world still pro­duces 300 mil­lion tonnes of plas­tic a year. Nonethe­less, design­ing with the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my in mind offers a rad­i­cal new approach to the pro­duc­tion-con­sump­tion par­a­digm. Adopt­ing recy­cled plas­tic as a new com­mod­i­ty will even­tu­al­ly dri­ve prices down and make cus­tomers more recep­tive to it. Rub­bish can become trea­sure.