Look at the packaging of the next product you buy and in a lot of cases you will find some information about the environmental impacts of the product. Some of this is basic information about how the product should be recycled at the end of its useful life. An increasing number of products display more sophisticated environmental data such as an eco label, the amount of recycled content in the materials used, or details of the product’s energy efficiency or carbon footprint.

The number of products displaying an eco label is set to increase over the coming years as companies introduce their own eco labels and organisations such as the European Commission and national governments expand the scope of existing eco labelling schemes and introduce new regulation, such as the Grenelle 2 law.

Choosing sustainable products

The rise of eco labels has implications for everybody, as we are all consumers, but there also specific implications for anybody involved in the design of products and the selection of materials.

As consumers, eco labels provide the opportunity to reduce the environmental impact associated with the products we buy by using the information in the label to influence our purchase decisions. However, consumers should be wary of ‘green wash’ – attempts by manufacturers to promote certain environmental credentials of a product to divert attention from other, more significant, environmental impacts. For example, if a car manufacturer wants to tell you about renewable energy used at their production plant rather than the fuel efficiency of their cars, the alarm bells should be ringing.

Here are a few tips to help you avoid being tricked by green wash and make more sustainable product choices by:

1. Having a basic understanding of the lifecycle of products and the impacts products they have on the environment from material extraction through to disposal.
2. Look for eco labels that provide credible, science-based environmental information such as the European Union’s Eco Label, the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Label, or the US EPA’s Energy Star label.
3. Make use of tools such as GoodGuide which provides an independent assessment of the environmental, social and health impacts of products and is available and a web-browser plug-in and a smartphone app.

Choosing Sustainable Materials

As designers, eco labels and the publication of product environmental data provide an opportunity for you to differentiate your product based on its environmental performance. One way to improve the environmental impact of your product is by choosing more sustainable materials. But as we have already heard in this blog series, there is no such thing as a ‘sustainable material’! So unfortunately there is no catalogue of sustainable materials for you to choose from. What you can do is to try to choose the most sustainable material for your application. I therefore encourage you to focus on the sustainable use of a material for a given application, rather than trying to find a ‘sustainable material’.

For both consumers and designers, the trend towards displaying more information about the environmental impacts of a product should be seen as an opportunity to move towards more sustainable products, a more sustainable use of materials, and a more sustainable future.

—

Post from Hello Materials

Living in a material world

The history of humanity begins with the development of civilisations that today we group into technological phases defined by the material that at any given time attained the highest degree of development (Stone Age, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age). Ever since, the development of the human being has been closely linked to his relationship with the materials that surround him: how to extract them, how to transform them, how to use them, how to synthesise them, how to recycle them… right from the earliest materials that man extracted from nature (timber, clay, stone, etc) to the use of the application of heat to the revolution in nanotechnology and nanoscience.

Technological Challenges

The technological challenges are the greatest ever faced by man in all his history. Despite having perfected the extraction of raw materials, dominated the synthesis of new materials, developed processing and manufacturing technologies and used different sources of energy for our activities, we have barely taken into account the consequences that all these phases had on our surroundings.

We are currently living in the silicon era, a new revolution that has propitiated the development of electronics and information and communication technologies.

Today we know that the environmental vector cannot be neglected in our activities; it has to be considered as a factor of maximum importance. In this context, recent decades have seen the emergence of a new discipline called bionics or biomimetics. These terms became popular as the result of the publication of the book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997) by Janine Beynus, which deals with “a new science that studies models from nature and is inspired in these designs and processes to address human problems”.

Biomimetics and sustainability

Science and Engineering have always had nature as a model and have used it to prosper; however, in recent times this natural study has become systematised, coherently involving professionals from different disciplines (biologists, designers, physicists, engineers, chemists, etc) to maximise the benefits extracted from the knowledge of Nature. While currently it still contains secrets that we cannot decipher, there is no doubt that the mimicry of natural processes, materials and solutions will be one of society’s routes to development and innovation.

At this point we have to stop and reflect: is biomimetics the universal solution to our environmental problems? The answer is no. Biomimetics is a tool under development and a source of innovation; a “new” (insofar as it refers to systematisation) starting point and approach to the search for occasional solutions to the challenges set by technological development. And we cannot always obtain the sought-for answer from Nature; at this point, as researchers well know, we need to change the model and continue to probe.

But there is still a tendency to directly associate biomimetics with sustainability, as if the former unequivocally involved the latter. There is no doubt that Nature can teach us much about how to protect life and resources (she has been doing it for millions of years), but knowing how to properly channel the information she provides towards developments that represent an environmental advance depends on us only insofar as it helps in “limiting the damage to the environment”.

—

Post from Hello Materials