The End is Near

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Product manufacturers worldwide have invested millions to improve the sustainability of their production processes. From the harvesting of raw materials to packaging on the final product, innovative changes are enabling companies to significantly reduce their carbon footprints.

That cradle-to-grave approach has resulted in novel front-end thinking about the impact products have on the environment. But it's not enough. Until companies approach product design with end-of-life in mind, landfills will continue to overflow with these “sustainably-designed” products whose usefulness have come to an end.

“Cradle-to-grave thinking creates incredible waste,” says Jay Bolus, vice president of technical operations for McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), a private consulting and Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) certification firm in Charlottesville, Va. “The concept has always been to throw things away when we are done with them, but there is no 'away' anymore. Unless we design with the end in mind, our legacy will be our landfills.”

This end-of-life design approach is gaining popularity in many green organizations where designers are incorporating characteristics into new products that allow for easy recycling, repurposing and dismantling when their current usefulness ends.

End-of-life design decisions must happen at the outset of product development for them to be effective, Bolus points out. “That focus informs a lot of other product decisions with respect to materials, how things fit together and how they come apart,” he says.

While this is a fairly new approach for some designers, industries such as floor coverings and automotive manufacturing have been leading the trend to identify and incorporate end-of-life choices that promise reduced waste for generations to come.

Driving A Trend

When people think of innovative green companies, they may not immediately think of the automotive industry, but auto manufacturers have been designing with end-of-life in mind for decades.

“Cars have been recycled for a very long time,” notes Dan Adsit, manager of vehicle environmental engineering for Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Mich. “We are very aware of what materials we use and how to bring them back at the end of a vehicle's life.”

Ford has strict requirements for recyclability in vehicle designs that starts at the drawing board and cascades across the development process. From using recycled materials in new vehicles and minimizing the use of restricted substances, to establishing processes and networks to dismantle, sort and repurpose up to 95 percent of any vehicle at the end of life, the auto industry has gotten end-of-life strategies down to a science.

And a big part of its success is industry members' willingness to collaborate with the competition.

“We believe that collaboration is the way to get things done,” says Claudia Duranceau senior research recycling engineer at Ford. “It allows us to be proactive, to work together to phase out materials, and to make sure we don't duplicate our efforts.”
Even in such a competitive market, all of the players in this industry agree that when it comes to end-of-life processes, there is more money to be made working together rather than apart. And the auto manufacturers benefit from being able to reclaim those materials for use in future vehicles.

“When we recycle cars, you can't tell where the material came from,” says Duranceau.

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