We have become used to products having a beginning and an end. We may buy and own things, but we know that the mobile phone in our pocket or the clothes in our cupboard are likely to be only temporary visitors.
Such beginnings and endings are often ‘out of sight, out of mind'. But if we want a world that is sustainable, we need to be thinking harder not only about how things are dealt with at the end of their useful lives, but also about how they are created in the first place. The way things are built or even the way they are conceived has a big impact on how or whether they are recycled and reused.
More than just a product
Many companies would answer that they already have a way of thinking about product lifecycles. The basic premise is familiar: product lifecycle management (or PLM as it is usually known) is a long-established part of the manufacturing process, and many businesses use complex PLM software to manage the lifecycle of products from design, to development, to eventual demise, covering four, six or even more stages.
But there seems to be something missing in much traditional thinking about product lifecycles, in particular the key issues of what happens at the very beginning and the very end. How will a product be disposed of, and how could it be designed in the first place, to minimise end-of-life waste and maximise end-of-life reuse?
Perhaps the problem is that PLM was designed to reduce the cost of developing new products and increase the speed of getting them to market. Sources point to the first applications of PLM in the automotive industry for exactly these reasons, before it spread across other industries. It was never intended as a tool for sustainability.
But there are some welcome signs that this way of thinking is changing.
True circularity
For one thing there is an increasing amount of regulation governing how products should be dealt with at the end of their lifecycle. In the European Union (EU), for example, the existing Waste Framework Directive is about to introduce significant increases in the amount of municipal waste that has to be reused or recycled, with further increases in 2030 and 2035. Meanwhile the European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan both include measures to make waste management more sustainable, not least by focusing on initial prevention of waste as well as on final recycling.
But these kinds of end-of-life measures are only going to have an impact if there is also a corporate focus on the first stage of the lifecycle, the stage where products are conceived and designed. Companies need to think more about whether their products are being built for circularity: are materials being graded for recyclability, and are they being designed to be easily repaired or easily dismantled and sorted? As circular economy champion The Ellen MacArthur Foundation puts it, we need products that are “made to be made again”.
Taking action
There is some evidence that these ideas are taking hold. Some organisations are now promoting a ‘5 R' recycling philosophy that alongside late-stage measures to reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle materials also includes a ‘refuse' stage right at the beginning of the manufacturing process. This means refusing to include non-recyclable or wasteful components or materials or designs at the point of initial conception.
This is a reminder that resource waste is not inevitable. It is a matter of choices that are made very early on in all production processes whether you are making a $1 toy or a $100,000 automobile. It is an extension of the ‘producer responsibility' concept that is behind a lot of new regulation and the EU Green Deal.
And it is hardly new. As the poet T S Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets almost a century ago: ‘In my beginning is my end'. As a manufacturing philosophy that sounds compelling – especially when the alternative for our planet is something more like The Waste Land.
