Factoring in the after life of gadgets
The spotlight is on designers who have traditionally been trained to think of a product in its lifetime, not after its death.
The spotlight is on designers who have traditionally been trained to think of a product in its lifetime, not after its death
Before the Panasonic SD Video Camera was born, designers planned for its death. When the camera wears out and can no longer record video, play music or take photos, Panasonic engineers want it to do one final thing: be easy to get rid of.
So it has no lead, no mercury and no brominated flame retardants - all hazardous substances that make consumer electronics such as personal computers, digital cameras and televisions dangerous to bury in landfills and difficult to recycle.
The cameras aluminum casing can be smelted and made into other products.
We wanted to eliminate hazardous materials and make it easy to recycle, said David Thompson, director of corporate environmental affairs for Matsushita Electrical Industrial Corp., which owns Panasonic. This is a design objective thats being built into all of our products.
Not just at Panasonic. Computer and electronics makers around the world increasingly factor a products destruction into its creation.
The trend is driven in part by environmental regulations but also by shorter product cycles and a consumer culture that allow obsolete gadgetry to stack up faster than ever.
Prices for electronics have come way down, said Philip White, principal designer at Orb Analysis in San Francisco and professor of product design at San Jose State University. Instead of fixing something, its become cheaper to throw it away and get a new one.
No longer users problem
Americans annually toss out more than 100 million cell phones, according to Collective Good International, a group that collects and re-sells used cell phones. Each day, 10,000 TVs and PC monitors go dark, according to the National Safety Council.
And an estimated three-quarters of all home PCs, working or not, are stuffed in closets, attics and basements - because getting rid of them is a hassle.
Disposing of old electronics traditionally has been the customers problem. Since January 1, however, California retailers have been required to collect a $6 to $10 (Dh22 to Dh37) recycling fee for every television and computer monitor sold.
The fee will fund payments to private recyclers, who are paid 48 cents (Dh3.3) a pound to dismantle and recover reusable materials in old monitors.
European countries go even further. Germany requires manufacturers to take back their products when customers are finished with them. Next year, the rest of the European Union will follow.
And by 2006, the EU will ban sales of equipment with lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and brominated flame retardants.
At the heart of these regulations is an economic notion stating that the best way to deal with pollution is to build its cost into the product.
If companies must pay to dispose of their own products, they would have an incentive to design their products to be easier to recycle and, thus, less costly to clean up.
If companies know theyre going to see these things again, will they design them differently? You bet they will, said Bruce Sterling, a lecturer at Pasadenas influential Art Center College of Design, which next year will include sustainable design classes in its curriculum.
At Panasonic, designers conduct a 40-step review that, among other things, looks at the ability to recycle materials used in their prototypes, and how quickly products can be taken apart. Designers are encouraged to use metals over plastic.
Designers also try to reduce the number of parts or materials used in a single product, making it simpler to sort and recycle.
A 1984 Panasonic television had 13 types of plastics, 39 plastic parts and took 140 seconds to take apart. The 2000 model had two types of plastic, eight plastic parts and took 78 seconds to disassemble.
Hewlett-Packard Company, which has taken back 100 million pounds of defunct products over the years, has made similar changes in its product designs.
The gatekeepers
Manolo Cassasola appreciates the effort. Cassasola dismantles electronic devices at Silicon Salvage, a recycling company in Anaheim, California.
Cassasola rips apart personal computers. In rapid, smooth motions, he pops out the circuit board and tosses it into a barrel behind him - a pound can sell for as much as $1 (Dh3.67), thanks to the tiny amounts of gold, silver, paladium and copper used to make it.
Copper wires go into another bin. And the CD-ROM and hard-disk drive are wiped clean of data and packed into boxes to be sent to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, where they are built into low-cost computers.
Some companies are trying to make sure that what they send to recyclers is clean. HP eliminated paint from many of its products as dyes can contaminate the underlying plastic when recycled.
This movement puts the spotlight on designers, said Bob Adams, a designer at IDEO, a technology design firm in Palo Alto.
They make decisions that result in how hundreds of millions of items are manufactured each year. They decide the shape of the object, how its produced, where its produced. Designers are, in a way, gatekeepers.
