Sustainability involves juggling a number of issues in a careful balancing act
- Materials - using less material (lightweighting), fewer materials (making it easier to recycle) and if possible avoiding toxic substances and choosing renewable or recycled/recyclable.
- Dematerialisation - could include some of the above, lightweighting for example, but also designing things to be multifunctional, or finding a different way to deliver the same benefit through a service or product-service combination, variously referred to as selling performance or results, or 'product service systems' (PSS).
- Design for disassembly - making things easy to take apart so they can be repaired, serviced, upgraded, remanufactured, or recycled, such as through modular design, or smart materials which can self-disassemble when needed.
- Energy - both in production (which would mean looking at the manufacturing process), and in use and disposal. This includes minimising energy use, moving to the use of renewable energy, and extracting energy from waste in some cases.
- Life extension - keeping a product, or its parts or materials, in productive use for their optimal lifespan, so slowing or preventing the linear flow of materials from extraction and processing to disposal.
- Transport - minimising it, that is. Sourcing a renewable, impeccably green material which you ship four times round the world may not be as sustainable as something a little less clean from down the road.
Nevertheless, a 'green product' could actually be unsustainable. Let's imagine you make something that uses recyclable and renewable materials, but you use child labour so nobody wants to buy it, and it ends up being dumped anyway, driving you out of business. You would have thrown the environmental ball up in the air for a moment, but you'd have dropped the social and economic balls, with the environmental one following soon after.
Sustainable design needs a broad, open, flexible and long-term mindset. It means bearing in mind the impact of a product including origins and disposal - so-called life-cycle thinking. It also means examining whether there is a different way to deliver the same function through a service or a product-service combination. That in turn can mean a new way of doing business and new customer relationships.
Because sustainability is by its nature multidisciplinary, it tends to straddle various organisational functions and considerations, which can make it tricky to know where to assign it. Some simply create a sustainability function or department. Others put it under environmental management or with corporate social responsibility (CSR). Both make sense. Corporate social responsibility, if taken to mean a company's responsibility to the society in which it operates, would reasonably include not ruining the environment. And sustainability includes social issues as much as environmental - how you treat your employees and customers, and what you give back to the community (ideally more than just a guilt-assuaging charity cheque once a year).