Living in a material e‑world

Gold, sil­ver and plat­inum will be among pre­cious met­als worth £1.5 bil­lion pur­chased unwit­ting­ly in the UK between now and 2020. This hoard of hid­den trea­sure will be scat­tered through­out ten mil­lion tonnes of elec­tron­ic prod­ucts bought by organ­i­sa­tions, com­pa­nies and pri­vate indi­vid­u­als alike.

Elec­tron­ic, dig­i­tal and mobile tech­nolo­gies are big busi­ness. The mar­ket­place is com­pet­i­tive, evolv­ing con­stant­ly and rapid­ly. Sales are strong, not least because prod­ucts date and break.

As a result, prod­uct and mate­r­i­al recov­ery, recy­cling and reuse is also an area of ris­ing con­cern – and oppor­tu­ni­ty. Waste elec­tri­cal and elec­tron­ic equip­ment (WEEE) is now the fastest grow­ing waste stream world­wide, with an esti­mat­ed two mil­lion tonnes dis­card­ed in the UK every year.

In response, new Euro­pean Union WEEE reg­u­la­tions com­ing into force this year seek to encour­age pro­duc­ers to con­sid­er the envi­ron­ment at dis­pos­al and end of life, design­ing out waste and adopt­ing cra­dle-to-cra­dle (C2C) respon­si­bil­i­ty for prod­ucts.

What will be the effect of these leg­isla­tive changes? The new oblig­a­tions car­ry poten­tial impli­ca­tions for all stake­hold­ers and life­cy­cle stages, from design, though man­u­fac­ture, to con­sump­tion and final­ly recov­ery. How will the mar­ket react?

“The major­i­ty of rethink­ing of e‑waste is dri­ven by clear and con­sis­tent reg­u­la­to­ry require­ments, pri­mar­i­ly ema­nat­ing from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion,” explains Will Schreiber, co-author of the WRAP report Reduc­ing the envi­ron­men­tal and cost impacts of elec­tri­cal prod­ucts, and asso­ciate direc­tor at Best Foot For­ward.

“Whether tele­vi­sions or wash­ing machines, the over­all trend in the elec­tri­cal sec­tor has been to make prod­ucts less repairable and have short­er life­times,” he says. “The changes that we see in response to leg­is­la­tion, how­ev­er, are start­ing to have an effect on the busi­ness mod­els some com­pa­nies are devel­op­ing by reduc­ing haz­ardous sub­stances, offer­ing longer war­ran­ty peri­ods or pro­vid­ing buy-back options.”

With strong gov­ern­ment lead­er­ship, respon­si­ble man­u­fac­tur­ers and increas­ing pub­lic aware­ness that recy­cling is good, but waste pre­ven­tion bet­ter, we can expect to see a shift in direc­tion in the next decade or so

This emerg­ing trend will ask ques­tions of prod­uct design­ers, a com­mu­ni­ty that has been rel­a­tive­ly slow to respond to the waste issue creep­ing up the cor­po­rate and reg­u­la­to­ry agen­da, accord­ing to design­er and head of sus­tain­abil­i­ty at Sey­mour­pow­ell Chris Sher­win.

“I don’t think design­ers have con­sid­ered the waste and dis­pos­al stages of prod­ucts any­where near as much as they should,” he says. “Most of what we do in design process­es is to become the cham­pi­on of the con­sumer expe­ri­ence. The main prob­lem with that is it miss­es off the front and espe­cial­ly the back-end aspects. We need a broad­er, more holis­tic approach.”

The con­di­tions for change are grad­u­al­ly becom­ing man­i­fest in elec­tron­ics mar­kets, with a com­bi­na­tion of con­trib­u­to­ry fac­tors in evi­dence, he says. “It is no secret that carbon/energy has been the main dri­ver for the elec­tron­ics sec­tor, but com­pa­nies are turn­ing more to waste and resource con­sump­tion, dri­ven by con­cepts like C2C, the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my, ris­ing mate­ri­als costs, bet­ter recy­cling and recov­ery infra­struc­ture. It seems more of a pri­or­i­ty in design now.”

Momen­tum in waste mar­kets still seems more push than pull though, as Mr Schreiber describes the dynam­ic. “Unlike ener­gy con­sump­tion, which has direct con­sumer ben­e­fits and there­fore demand, mate­r­i­al con­trol and opti­mi­sa­tion are most­ly dri­ven by cost sav­ings and reg­u­la­tions for crit­i­cal raw mate­ri­als, such as rare earths, Dodd-Frank [reg­u­lat­ed] con­flict min­er­als,” he says. “The biggest pro­po­nents of change have been the brands them­selves set­ting a clear strat­e­gy. The prob­lem is that few organ­i­sa­tions have actu­al­ly looked at waste as a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty rather than a bur­den.”

This lim­it­ed response may well be explained in part by the weak sig­nals being received in gen­er­al from a cus­tomer base typ­i­cal­ly still stuck in con­sumer mode, as Adam Read, prac­tice direc­tor – waste man­age­ment and resource effi­cien­cy, at Ricar­do-AEA, explains: “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the dri­ve of con­sumerism is a lit­tle like the Titan­ic – dif­fi­cult to slow, almost impos­si­ble to divert and ulti­mate­ly des­tined for fail­ure. Although con­sumers may not be chang­ing on their own, with strong gov­ern­ment lead­er­ship, respon­si­ble man­u­fac­tur­ers and increas­ing pub­lic aware­ness that recy­cling is good, but waste pre­ven­tion bet­ter, we can expect to see a shift in direc­tion in the next decade or so.”

Are we near­ing a tip­ping point? Sophie Thomas, co-direc­tor of design at the RSA and one of the founders of the Great Recov­ery Project, reimag­in­ing prod­ucts and mate­r­i­al flow cycles, seems to think so. She coun­sels though that things could yet go one of two ways, with the waste sec­tor “either on the cusp of some­thing great or the edge of a cliff”.

Dr Read con­cludes that break­ing tra­di­tion­al take-make-waste par­a­digms depends on a clear busi­ness case emerg­ing on the sup­ply-side and a cir­cle more mate­r­i­al than vir­tu­ous. “Ulti­mate­ly, we are fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant resource risks in the elec­tri­cal prod­ucts world, from rare-earth met­als in par­tic­u­lar, so price will con­tin­ue to increase as scarci­ty wors­ens,” he says. “This will dri­ve inno­va­tion in prod­uct design and pro­cess­ing, includ­ing more closed-loop solu­tions where elec­tri­cal prod­ucts are nev­er owned, just leased/rented from man­u­fac­tur­ers, thus enabling them to con­trol the sup­ply of increas­ing­ly valu­able mate­ri­als.”

For all the vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty and cloud com­put­ing advan­tages afford­ed us by the lat­est elec­tron­ic and mobile tech­nol­o­gy, the means to these online ends are still very much ground­ed in phys­i­cal com­modi­ties and min­er­al prop­er­ties. Para­dox­i­cal as it might seem, we are liv­ing in a mate­r­i­al e‑world.