House of Lords - Science and Technology

Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence

Memorandum by Social Environmental Enterprise + Design

JOINING THE DOTS

1. ROLE OF DESIGN

1.1 Up to now, where design thinking has been applied to the problem of waste, it has tended to be in the realm of product and packaging design. This misses some vital areas of activity. Advanced design thinking has begun to look at systems and services as raw materials, and it is this approach that we believe needs to be introduced into mainstream design activity on waste.

1.2 Dealing with waste is not just about mitigating the effect of the stuff that is in the waste stream. It is about asking why it is in the waste stream in the first place and stepping back to see how waste is perpetuated not just by the objects themselves, but by what surrounds them. In fact, while looking at products and the way they are designed is important, doing so without considering the infrastructure that supports them and the behaviour of the people who use them is meaningless.

1.3 Imagine a car that fulfils all the criteria of sustainable design best practice. It has a hybrid engine and can run on bio-fuels. Its parts have been subject to Life Cycle Analysis to ensure minimum overall impact and are made from recycled materials that can be disassembled quickly for easy repair and upgrades, replacement and recycling. The owner's manual provides all the details of how to dispose of the vehicle and of defunct parts responsibly—beyond the legal requirements for disposing of automobiles.

1.4 The problem is, this does very little to alter the behaviour that creates waste—and even runs the risk of increasing it. The owner, feeling that their car is virtuously green, may drive it more frequently. Very likely too, for all the good intentions of the car manual, the owner may not find it easy to implement the recommendations for disposal of the vehicle at the end of its lifecycle if the infrastructure is not in place. Ultimately, coupled with an increase in consumption in society overall, the waste reduction gains envisaged by the car's designers could, in practice, quite easily be non-existent.

1.5 Design can help at a strategic level by redefining problems. In this case, the focus of the problem might be not how to make the car itself less wasteful, but instead how to get people from one place to another with the efficiency and convenience of a car, without the waste.

1.6 The company Streetcar has reframed this question and thereby exploited its economic potential. Streetcar is a flexible car-hire service that affords people the mobility of a private vehicle without the associated inefficiency and costs. This revised business model reduces waste further upstream by reducing car ownership and, ultimately, therefore, the number of cars that will be disposed of.

1.7 Designers Braungart and McDonough have taken this to the next level in the development of a car for Ford. Model U's portfolio of leading edge sustainability measures includes a new business model whereby the customer buys not the car but the services for the car—tax, insurance, petrol and costs—for a given number of miles. At the end of this distance the car returns to the manufacturer, enabling the up-cycling of all components. Says designer William McDonough, "The vision behind Model U is entirely positive. Instead of focusing on minimising environmental harm, which is what most approaches to sustainable mobility do, Model U starts to find ways to be recreational and regenerative—to have fun and create environmental benefits at the same time."[13]

1.8 This type of joined-up design thinking can help redefine many problems that currently plague the waste agenda. The emblematic waste issue of plastic bags, for example has hitherto been addressed by either capping their free distribution or substituting the plastic for more "environmentally friendly" materials. But Defra research shows that 80 per cent of plastic bags are reused in the home, and the unforeseen consequence of taxing plastic bags in Ireland was a 300-500 per cent increase in the sale of plastic refuse bags and bin liners.[14] Focusing on what at first appears to be the problem often just shifts it somewhere else.

1.9 Like all issues, plastic bags are a part of a complex web of inter-connecting systems that will be more efficiently examined in relation to each other than in isolation. A designer might find, through observing the behaviour of shoppers, that the real problem is not the bag at all, but, more broadly, how people get their shopping home. This kind of analysis also expands the realm of possible stakeholders (eg the planning authority, local waste authority, public transport provider etc) to consider who else might contribute to the solution.

1.10 Advanced design thinking increasingly recognises the need to address relationships rather than deal with isolated products. It examines the connections between things, the infrastructure that supports them and the people who use both. This seems far from design's traditional role of creating objects, but actually relies on similar techniques of visualisation, prototyping and observing user behaviour. Finally, it promotes the adoption of new behaviour by making it desirable.

1.11 This kind of approach is already being used successfully in services and social planning, where UK designers are among the frontrunners in applying design methods to encourage behaviour change, solving problems of systems and services rather than just producing more "stuff".[15]

2. ROLE OF BUSINESS

Redesigning products

2.1 It is important to distinguish between SMEs and big businesses in their capacity to react to the waste agenda. SMEs rarely have the human or economic resource to invest in developing new solutions. Rather, buried in supply chains and, all too often, in fire-fighting mode, they can only react to the demands of clients, legislation, and increasing costs of energy and waste management.

2.2 Conversely, big businesses, more resourceful and on the frontline of the market pulse, are equipped to deal with and anticipate change. With their sights on the longer-term movement of the market they are able to invest in research and development to identify and prepare for future trends.

2.3 Many of these bigger businesses are already addressing their waste issues through measures such as product or packaging redesigns and some are already making vast savings from doing so. Walmart reduced packaging for just one toy line and made annual savings of more than $2.4 million, as well as saving more than 3,800 trees and more than 1,000 barrels of oil.[16] Measures such as these, however, are still an afterthought that works at the end of the waste stream, meaning that they do little to change the way these businesses operate and, in the broad scheme of things, also do little to reduce overall waste volumes. It's a bit like dieting to mitigate the effects of a high-fat diet when what's really needed is a permanent change to more healthy eating habits.

2.4 Current legislation frequently appears stuck in this mindset too. It can force businesses to reduce waste, but there is an assumption on all sides that the necessary measures are a burden that must be kept to a minimum and complied with to the letter and no more. There is still widespread fear that a green agenda implies an austerity that will be harmful to economies. For businesses to truly focus on waste reduction and see it as an area for serious innovation and investment, they must come to understand that it can confer a genuine competitive advantage. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and there is a historical link between crisis and innovation. Would the industrial revolution have been as accelerated without the abolition of the slave trade, greatly feared as an economic catastrophe at the time?

2.5 Design, used strategically rather than just as a means of making small fixes, is a powerful tool for the kind of innovation now required and a potentially enormous source of economic opportunity. Beyond product and packaging, we have identified two main strategic approaches by which design can help business take on the waste challenge and turn it into opportunity.

Revenue from waste

2.6 "Waste is just resource in the wrong place"[17] and Greenworks, a company that collects and re-purposes used office furniture, is one of numerous examples of how businesses are seizing the opportunities this implies. If businesses used creative thinking to view their own waste as a new resource, they might easily uncover new revenue streams, new efficiencies and even new business models. This is what Andrew Zolli terms a business "Twofer":[18] it has the twin benefits of reducing waste and generating new income.

2.7 There was a time when the use of waste as resource was commonplace and common sense. The fortunes of Huddersfield, for example, were partly built on the recycling techniques of Shoddy, a process that turned used cotton into a felt-like fabric for duffle coats and the like. The cheapness of foreign clothing and textile markets have led to the downfall of such techniques in the UK and the word Shoddy has become imbued with connotations of cheapness, inferior material and poor workmanship.[19]

2.8 The current associations of "recycling", "reconditioning", or "salvage", means that the products of these processes are viewed as niche, austere and appeal only to a narrow band of "ethical" consumers. Quality design would give them an extra business boost, turning waste streams into glamorous and sought-after mainstream furniture and clothing. What is needed is a pool of high-end designers prepared to see the opportunity and challenge the assumptions of their own industries.

Challenge the product paradigm

2.9 There is a still more effective way for businesses to deal with waste reduction: adopt a business model that produces less waste.

2.10 According to the sustainable design network, Sus|pro-net, "Companies should switch their focus to [offering] a mix of tangible products and intangible services, designed and combined to jointly fulfill a user's needs."[20]

2.11 Businesses that sell products measure their success in turnover of units. A service model removes this dependency, but can be equally if not more successful. Electrolux has been piloting a project to test this thinking: instead of selling washing machines (product), they supply the machine free. Each wash is then paid for through the electricity bill. The problem is redefined as one of fulfilling a user need—clean clothes (service). Over the lifetime of the machine, this is likely to generate a higher turnover than just selling a machine. Since Electrolux retains ownership of the machine, they also have greater incentive to design it to be easily repaired and to last longer. In addition, the company is involved in the end-of-life of the machine and can remanufacture it or recycle its materials.[21] There is an added benefit in user behaviour change, since paying per wash will likely make customers wash less, with a consequent saving of water and washing powder.

2.12 The United Nations Environment Programme believes a further advantage of service design is that it requires integrated working of stakeholders, the real key to unlocking environmental benefits.[22] Britain already has a very strong service industry and also has pioneering service designers, putting it in an excellent position to generate new sustainable service models.

Design in business

2.13 The sustainability agenda is triggering a revolutionary moment in business. As happened in the information revolution, new and more nimble businesses better suited to the fast-changing conditions of the market, will seize opportunities and could supplant larger, slower moving competitors. Existing businesses are going to have to think on their feet and design will be an invaluable tool to help them do so.

2.14 Waste is one of many sustainability issues, most of them interdependent, that companies now urgently need to address. Exploring the solutions will require a major shift in the way businesses are using design. They will need to involve design in strategic decision-making processes to ensure all the core functions of a business, not only those engaged with CSR, are working together to drive innovation. Design briefs, which often come from the marketing department, should be co-created by various teams including the designers themselves. CSR, likewise, can no longer be treated as a bolt-on. Integrating designers into the CSR process will help create new relationships with the supply chain.

2.15 Marks & Spencers leads this approach with "Plan A" in which everyone in the organisation is driving towards many seemingly impossible targets. This integrated approach will allow departments traditionally operating in silos to collaborate and share knowledge, and will surely lead to some innovative and surprising solutions. Designers can not only participate in, but help co-ordinate this type of approach by mapping how individuals and departments are interconnected.

What role do marketing strategies play in influencing more sustainable design?

2.16 Many companies are just jumping on the green bandwagon without a deep change in their behaviour and marketing is often seen as the means by which they are able to produce spin about their performance. But consumers have ready access to information and are more and more interested in finding it. False marketing can harm a company as fast as responsible marketing can build it.

2.17 Green communication group Better Thinking describe a history of consumption in which competitive advantage used to be based on product, then on brand. "The next step" says the company's director Mike Betts "is that businesses will be valued on their behaviour and will have to provide transparency in order to maintain customer loyalty." As in the Industrial and Information revolutions, "those companies that are able to shift to ecologically innovative capitalism and meet the needs of consumers will be reaping huge rewards."[23]

2.18 The real role of marketing strategies in influencing more sustainable design lies in the correct and well-placed dissemination of information to the consumer, increasing transparency and integrity of the company it represents.

3. EDUCATION

3.1 The structure of design education goes back to post-war Britain when designers with specific skill-sets were needed to create quality products that could be manufactured in the UK and contribute to economic recovery. Design is still taught within the constricts of this narrow and silo structure even though present day complexities require a broader understanding of the interdependent systems that govern our lifestyles.

3.2 For many years British design has enjoyed a world-class reputation for quality, and around the world design colleges are evolving to respond to new global circumstances. If we are to retain our leadership status in this field, British design education must urgently adapt to encompass the social and environmental imperatives as well the economic ones to which it has historically responded.

3.3 While in recent months sustainability awareness has clearly increased dramatically, there is still only a tiny proportion of college graduate work that demonstrates an interest in such matters. This indicates that while there is a mass of information available for designers wishing to work sustainably, universities are taking insufficient steps to ensure this agenda becomes fully embedded in the curriculum. With over 50,000 designers in higher education, this lack of awareness of their future professional responsibility is a grave omission.

3.4 Education about sustainable materials and processes, particularly processes associated with waste, must be firmly established as a baseline for all design students. There are 185,500 designers currently practicing in the UK. Every decision they make is multiplied, thousands if not millions of times over, creating effects on a massive scale.

4. ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

Legislation and beyond

4.1 As we said in the business section, government legislation on waste is frequently seen as a burden on business. However, there are numerous areas in which a change in the law would hurt nobody and benefit everybody. For example, standardisation of the type of plastic used in packaging would facilitate much more efficient recycling. One might further ban the use of black plastic since it is very hard for MRF (material recycling facilities) machinery to identify this as plastic and thereby separate it out.

4.2 This kind of anomaly indicates a systemic problem in the current approach to waste: in numerous ways, it's not joined up. Recycling programmes are being rolled out around the country, but their activity is still being severely hobbled by unnecessary inefficiencies at the other end of the waste stream—such as that of plastic.

4.3 The lack of joined-up thinking creates problems at every level. The UK sends over 70 per cent of its waste to landfill, making it one of the worst offenders in Europe (the figure in the Netherlands is less than 10 per cent). This might indicate that there are important lessons to be learned from abroad. However, this assumption ignores the fact that numerous waste initiatives in the UK are successful. It's just that they are small-scale and local and there is little traffic in ideas between them. We are not yet even learning from our own successes—certainly not in a sufficiently structured way.

4.4 Former local councillor Stuart Singleton-White, talking about the problems of waste minimisation in Peterborough, indicates the current failings: "...the root of these problems lies in the disconnect between those local politicians and members of the community, coupled with very poor communications skills for both the politicians themselves and from the PR teams of the respective council: a clear lack of creativity here often results in exciting opportunities being lost and failing to excite: cases failing to be made and policies developed in isolation."[24]

4.5 Tower Hamlets Community Recycling Consortium recently achieved a huge success in introducing door-to-door recycling for residents of high-rise estates—something that has traditionally been a stumbling block. Involving locals from the start and making education a key pillar of the rollout, they hugely exceeded participation projections of 35 per cent. Actual take-up was 65 per cent—higher than ordinary kerbside collections.[25]

4.6 For this kind of success to realise all its potential capital, central co-ordination is required. Local schemes, rather than being seen simply as the way things are done, should be seen as pilot operations. Where a scheme is shown to be a success, it should supplant less successful operations elsewhere.

4.7 This points to a clear role for government beyond legislation. Government needs to create a hub to facilitate the joining up of all the different things that are happening, organising information to make it as accessible as possible to people who want to make changes and facilitating conversations and collaborations between different stakeholders from the various sectors of society. This kind of mapping and facilitation is, to a large extent, the province of design.

5. CONCLUSION

5.1 The Sustainable Development Commission paper I Will If You Will describes a gridlock on sustainability issues between the three key sectors in society: government, business and ordinary people.[26] Each is wary of the other and each is reluctant to make a move without the assurance that the other will follow. Waste issues clearly hinge on all these groups in numerous ways and it is this complex system of relationships that a product-design focused approach to waste misses. To return to the example of the supermarket plastic bag, its network of relationships takes in government waste targets, consumer behaviour beyond the shopping trip (since the bags are reused), and the interests of a number of businesses. A creative design approach to the problem would co-ordinate the needs of all these groups to come up with a really effective and, perhaps counter-intuitive solution. In the end, it might turn out that the solution lay somewhere utterly surprising, for instance, in a system integrating supermarket trolleys and public transport, eliminating the need for bags at all.

5.2 Design methods such as visualisation, prototyping and the staging of real-world scenarios provide quick and relatively cheap ways of approaching these kinds of problems. Results of these investigations are frequently unpredictable because they base themselves on the observation of people's behaviour rather than simply listening to what they say. There is frequently a disconnect between the two things. People say they do one thing when they actually do another. Participants in a Phillips design focus group uniformly stated a preference for a black and yellow radio. However, offered a complimentary radio upon leaving, everyone chose a plain black one. Getting to the bottom of people's behaviour and reacting to it appropriately is something a designer is exceptionally well equipped to do.

5.3 Waste is an overwhelmingly social problem and design's great strength in approaching it would be a focus on end users, whether from business, government, the general populace or all three. A user-centred approach engages all interest groups and encourages their active participation in the design process. For organisations of any sort whose primary objective is to engage communities, there can be few more effective methods of tackling the problem head on.

Further information

The Social Environmental Enterprise + Design is a not-for-profit alliance combining design with other disciplines to develop new solutions for more sustainable lifestyles.

There are three underlying purposes of the organisation:

New ways of working—to investigate ways of using design with other disciplines to create new business opportunities through solving social and environmental challenges that resist conventional solutions.

Leadership

Education

Through our actions we will help businesses harness the power of design to reach their own specific citizenship targets. Our aim is to foster new enterprises that are turning social and environmental problems into economic opportunities through design.

We are entering a new green economy, one in which design can play a vital role in co-ordinating the inter-dependent needs of society, public services and business and in doing so, identify real opportunities for business benefit. There are many non-design organisations that are tackling social or environmental issues, but they rarely consider design as an appropriate tool for innovative problem solving. Similarly, among design organisations, there are none to our knowledge that are thinking about sustainability in a way that goes beyond the realm of the product and its consequences. "Sustainability is surely as much about creating communities and jobs to enhance life as it is about reuse and recycling."[27]

Social Environmental Enterprise + Design is ready to trial projects to push the boundaries of what design can achieve with regard to waste to create a suite of examples, tools and strategies that will co-ordinate the needs of business, government and people. In doing so, it will create new business opportunities and put British design at the forefront of the sustainability agenda.

We believe there is a need for an information hub to bring together all the disparate efforts and information in this field. Users of all types—designer, industry, local authorities or organisations—should be able to log in to a central portal and website and be redirected to the relevant information they need to support their sustainability requirements. This will go some way fulfilling a general need to map, measure and celebrate existing information and work through the collation of stories and strategies.

October 2007