Integrating Sustainability with Eco-Friendly Product Design

At the start of the 21st century, everyone agreed that the next big thing was clean technology. This was the first sentence of the 13th chapter of Peter Thiel’s book on startups – Zero to One. Undoubtedly, this statement emphasized the world’s need for eco-friendly product design.

Concerns keep growing over climate change and the detrimental state of global health. Some of the instances that preempt these concerns include Hurricane Katrina and Ivan, arsenic-laden water wells in Bangladesh, the smog in Beijing, and a lot more.

Every industry and company is prioritizing green energy, clean tech, and eco-friendly products. And at the heart of this new technology or process of production is sustainability. This idea of sustainability is inspiring product designers to drastically reduce the environmental risk of their products.

To ensure that your customers are not ditching you for a competitor’s green company we have some tips for you. Therefore, these tips show different methods for inculcating sustainability. Furthermore, it will also give you ideas to be part of eco-friendly product development.

Method 1: Dematerialize Eco-Friendly Product Design

Reducing the material incorporated into a product is a good way to start. For instance, the more the material used in product production the greater the impact on the environment. Hence, carefully selecting the number, size, and weight of the material for production encourages sustainability.

Dematerializing your design can mean changing the material entirely. In many other cases, it is the packaging that has to be changed. Check out this sustainable bottle on our website.

Method 2: Longevity of Eco-Friendly Product Development

The extreme of dematerializing is to compromise the quality of the product. However, lasting products also equal less material. And less material means lesser impact on the environment.

Selecting materials and designs that promote durability is a major sustainability choice. Hence, substandard products contribute more to landfills. Highly durable products can be resold or passed on to another user.

Method 3: Eco-Friendly 3d-Printing Disassembly and Repair

Both the prototype and the final product should be easy to pull apart and put together. Starting with prototypes; make all the corrections you desire to it before proceeding to mass production. Also, prototyping should be approached with flexibility.

Prototypes should be designed to reduce the number of parts that need to be made to accommodate design changes. In the same way, a product design should accommodate upgrading and repairing the product.

It is often thought that products that can easily be disassembled or repaired are not good enough. However, that is not the case. Encouraging repairability helps to prolong its usage and fosters sustainability.

Method 4: Recyclable Eco-Friendly Product Design

If a product does not work after repair, then it should be recycled. Recycling a product is instigated right from the product design. For instance, an eco-friendly product design considers the need to recapture and recycle the product.

The location of a product ends up after its useful life will determine if it will be recyclable. However, without recycling certain products their life cycle is open and harmful to the environment. Hence, every part of a product, including the packaging, must be easy to recycle.

Method 5: Creating Reusable Eco-Friendly 3d-Printing

Reusability is an alternative to recycling. Instead of recycling a product after its use life, you can prolong its use even further by reusing it. For example, there are jars and holding containers in your kitchen and around you.

Designing a product and marketing it with the motif of having a second or third life is key to sustainability. In essence, it prolongs the product life cycle.

Another form of reusability is soft drink bottles. They were designed to be durable enough to be reused severally.

Method 6: Reduce Input Requirement of Eco-Friendly Product Design

Eco-friendly product design has to consider the maintenance of a product to make it sustainable. Hence, the efficiency in maintaining the product life cycle is paramount. Learn more about the product life cycle in this article.

Many products, called active products, require constant cleaning, washing, or inputs of energy – charging. Therefore, limiting the need to recharge or clean a product will reduce the product wearing and prolong its use.

Method 7: Remove Fossil Energy Sources in Eco-Friendly Product Development

Extracting materials for eco-friendly product design requires complex systems. These systems require a great amount of energy, and the resulting by-products are very harmful.

The extraction process often produces CO2, which has been the greatest contributor to detrimental global health, especially climate change. Aside from the intense air produced, other emissions like water and waste generated are equally harmful to the environment.

There are eco-friendly alternatives to these complex extraction systems. Hence, using these alternatives will help to remove fossil energy and its harmful emissions.