WASTE IS DESIGN GONE WRONG by andyfischer87

Waste is design gone wrong ANDREA FISCHER MA SERVICE DESIGN Royal College of art 2015 9942 words

Waste is design gone Wrong looking at the Circular economy through the lens of (service) design

written and researched by Andrea fischer as part of the Critical & Historical Studies Dissertation, supervised by Joe Kerr.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most sincere â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;thank youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to my tutor, Joe Kerr, for the incredible support and patience during the last few months. MUCHAS GRACIAS! to my family, who are always there for me, no matter what. And to Christopher, for his relentless strength, love and encouragement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

9 INTRODUCTION 17 18

PART 1 Short history lesson on our path to

consumerism

PART 2

It’s a linear model

Gaining perspective through an experiment

Revelation 1

Revelation 2

The Circular Economy

Is it feasible?

Transitioning towards a Circular Economy

Service Design and the Circular Economy

1. PATAGONIA

2. MUD JEANS

3. PHILIPS

47 learnings

PART 3

IMPLEMENTING THE Circular Economy FRAMEWORK

CHALLENGE 1

52 WHY GREEN IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER 54

CHALLENGE 2

59 CONCLUSION 60

THE SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE: IT’S A DESIGN ISSUE

62 BIBLIOGRAPHY 62 Books, Articles & Reportsww 64

ONLINE REFERENCES

66 VIDEOS 68 Personal Interviews

list of figures

12 Figure 1: gROUP PROJECT, ‘CAMDEN COUNCIL BINS’, 2014 12 Figure 2: Andrea Fischer, ‘my waste’, 2015 12 Figure 3: Andrea Fischer, ‘mix of garbage’, 2015 12 Figure 4: Andrea Fischer, ‘disposing’, 2015 12 Figure 5: gROUP PROJECT, ‘garbage in camden’, 2014 24 Figure 6. Linear Economy, adapted by the author 25 Figure 7: ‘Take-make-dispose’,

2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTiaS7kh2k> [accessed 16 August 2015], adapted by the author

31 Figure 8: ‘Drawer 3’, Andrea Fischer, 2015 31 Figure 9: ‘Drawer 1’, Andrea Fischer, 2015 33 Figure 10: ‘The Circular Economy - an Industrial

System That Is Restorative by Design’, 2013. 2013. <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/ reports: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012> [accessed 15 August 2015], adapted by the author

36 Figure 11: Value in USD per phone.

2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTiaS7kh2k> [accessed 16 August 2015]. Adapted by the author

40 Figure 12: Arnold Tukker, ‘Main and Subcategories of PSS’, 2004, adapted by the author

41 Figures 13 and 14: ‘Don’t buy this jacket’,

<http://yitzchoksaftlas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ dontbuythisjacket.jpg> [accessed 29 September 2015]. ‘Better than new’. <http://acontinuouslean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/NYT_ Ad.jpg> [accessed 29 September 2015].

42 Figure 15: PATAGONIA REPAIR MANUALS ON IFIXIT.COM. < https://www.ifixit.com/Patagonia> [accessed 15 September 2015].

43 Figure 16: MUD Jeans, printed label

<http://www.getchanged.net/webautor-data/46/MudJeans-02_0.jpg> [accessed 29 September 2015]

44 Figure 17: THe Sartorial circle of mud jeans

<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ftgwx6AztSc/VGjJOJ6fHMI/ AAAAAAAAEIo/bNJgO4wEIic/s1600/CONSCIOUSLY_ SARTORIAL_MUD_JEANS.jpg> [accessed 23 September 2015].

45 Figure 18: RAU Architects office with Pay per Lux system <http://assets.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/uploads/ case_studies/heros/37/original.png?1378479534> [accessed 25 September 2015] 46 Figure 19: Benefits of the Circular Economy for

RAU Architects <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/case_studies/ philips-and-turntoo#> [accessed 25 September 2015], adapted by author

57 Figure 20: Energy Trump Cards

‘Energy Trump Cards’, <http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/ blogs.dir/1/files/2012/11/energy-trumps.jpeg> [accessed 27 September 2015], adapted by the author

57 Figure 21: Tear down process

<http://usefulsimpleprojects.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ useful-simple-the-great-recovery.jpg> [accessed 27 September 2015], adapted by the author

57 Figure 22: Good Design Guide

<http://www.gooddesignguide.com> [accessed 27 September 2015]

57 Figure 23: Design Play Cards

<http://static.wixstatic.com/ media/0e4df4_241adce33f8e4295eaf73e7027891127.jpg_srz_980 _980_85_22_0.50_1.20_0.00_jpg_srz> [accessed 27 September 2015]

We live in an “overarching design framework […] Nothing goes in or out of the planetary system except for heat and the occasional meteorite. […] Whatever is naturally here is all we have. Whatever humans make does not go “away”.” -McDonough & Braungart

INTRODUCTION

Coming to the RCA, (with a danger of sounding phony in my first sentence), has changed my perspective in a way that it has rarely changed before. It started during the first term when we were asked to look at the waste management service of the Borough of Camden, choose a specific type of refuse, and design a service that would help improve recycling rates. These rates are, currently at 29% in Camden, but the national target is at least 40% by 2020. There is clearly a long way to go and not much time left. As we started to research, we became interested in the topic of food waste, partly because it is something we can all relate to from first hand experience. This, we thought, was a good prerequisite for designing around it. Since starting this project, my life has not been the same. It made me reflect enormously on the topic of rubbish, and now I can’t help but notice every type of refuse around me and be appalled by its ubiquitous presence. I think before that, I was just used to seeing it everywhere: the plastic bags that shops left on the pavement each morning for the trucks to pick up and the overfilled bins where people skillfully tried to fit in one more plastic salad box or balance one more Starbucks coffee cup on top of the pile, as if laying another pebble in a stack of zen stones. Even the giant black and green recycling bins of estate houses that decorate most of our curbsides nowadays: somehow everything has become invisible. Garbage has, in a way, become so engrained in our identities, that we can no longer see what it stands for. It has become almost like an accessory to our architecture, our construct of the world we live in, both mental and physical. “Garbage passes under our eyes virtually unnoticed, the continual turnover inhibiting perception. The cliché about garbage we’ve all heard is: ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ Yet even when it’s in sight garbage somehow manages to remain out of mind.”1 But more than becoming acutely aware of the waste we as a society throw away, I was amazed to discover how much I, as an individual, throw away. I like to think of myself as a good person, conscious of my surroundings and respectful of nature. However, in my apart-

1. William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2001).p. 45

ment in London which I share with two flatmates, we throw away between 1-2 black bags every day. It’s funny how three girls, one from Germany, one from Austria, and me - half Swiss - who come from countries with high awareness of recycling and correct disposal of waste, don’t keep our habits here. One night, as I addressed the issue during a kitchen encounter, I suggested we start recycling our food. The answer from the German girl was: “I don’t want to be part of that. We will have a lot of flies. I do it at home, but I am not going to do it here.” Many questions raced through my mind: Why did she see the obligation to do it at home, but not here? Was it because in Germany the systems are easier and cleaner, therefore more conducive to good behaviour? Was it perhaps a simple design problem: the actual design of the bin that makes your food smell bad in the kitchen? Was her answer rooted in the fact that she thinks of Germany as home, whereas London is just a temporary hub she currently lives in, and which she doesn’t consider to be part of the same planet as Germany? Or finally, could it be that the recycling culture here is so weak that she doesn’t feel any of the same social pressure as she might have back in Germany, (where a neighbour will reliably complain about your misplaced plastic bottle)? I found it funny how irrational her answer was. As if recycling at home would suffice to establish her credibility as a good person, therefore excusing her from displaying the same behaviour elsewhere. This whole mental journey of waste has taken up a lot of space in my mind since that project. Through research I found myself in the land of bloggers who make a living out of the zero waste philosophy. Lauren Singer’s blog ‘Trash is for tossers’2, and Bea Johnson’s ‘Zero Waste Home’ website3 gave me a first glimpse of what people are doing to reduce their footprint and change their consumption habits. I was completely hooked. It also made me feel like something in my life needed to change.

2. Lauren Nicole Singer, ‘Trash Is for Tossers’, 2015 <http://www.trashisfortossers. com> [accessed 26 July 2015]. 3. ‘Zero Waste Home’ <http://www.zerowastehome.com> [accessed 26 July 2015].

Figure 1 (above): commercial waste bins as part of the cityscape in London Figure 2 (right): Snapshot of the garbage in my household: what 3 girls throw away in two days. Figure 3 (next page, top left): Organic refuse is mixed with plastic and other garbage due to lack of compost bin. Figure 4 (next page, top right): The garbage bag disappears swiftly out of my life Figure 5 (bottom): commercial waste on the curbside, about to be picked up

So I started a zero waste experiment, just to understand what it would mean to completely change the way I shop, eat and clean, etc. One thing became clear: this city (London), does not make it easy to reduce one’s garbage. In the second part of this dissertation I will explain in more detail what the experiment entailed and disclose two revelations from my personal perspective. After these events, I thought my dissertation was going to be about zero waste as a lifestyle, but after a couple of days of research and endless open tabs on my browser, I realized the issue I am trying to tackle is so much bigger than that. It is not (only) about reducing how much plastic or food refuse is created and how I can reach a zero waste household. It is about challenging the current system itself. Einstein once famously said:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Our current system encourages short term thinking, layering simple solutions upon complex problems, trying to sustain the unsustainable.

overshoot day

the day each year when our demands on the planet outstrip its ability to regenerate and we go into ecological debt

A recent article by The Guardian shockingly reported that this year we have reached overshoot day six days earlier than in 2014, and humanity is currently consuming the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year4. Other sources state that 3 planets would be needed to keep up with our consumption rates, and it takes the biosphere 18 months to produce what we consume in 12 months.5 Whatever the figure, they all point to the same logic: our current system is neither sustainable nor desirable.

4. Emma Howard, ‘Humans Have Already Used up 2015’s Supply of Earth’s Resources – Analysis’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 12 August 2015) <http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/12/humans-have-already-used-up2015s-supply-of-earths-resources-analysis> [accessed 20 August 2015]. 5. Andrew Simms and Ruth Potts, ‘The New Materialism How Our Relationship with the Material World Can Change for the Better’, 2012 <http://www.irre.hr/ docs/thenewmaterialism_241112.pdf> [accessed 21 August 2015].

This dissertation is about the framework of the Circular Economy (CE), a model that radically challenges the way we think about our economy; and how the design discipline, with a deeper take on service design, can contribute to its transition of worldwide adoption. I will try to answer a few of the following questions: What is the Circular Economy? What does it challenge? What role does (service) design play in the transition towards a Circular Economy? What are the challenges the discipline needs to overcome? How can designers become more conscious of their responsibility towards design for sustainability and longer lasting products? What tools are there currently available for designers to use in relation to the CE? This paper is structured in the following way: In the first section I will present a short summary of historic events that have led us to becoming insatiable consumers, ignorant of the consequences of our actions. This serves as an introduction to the discussion about the inability of humans to cope with their own waste and the depletion of resources that drive many of our most pressing environmental issues. The second chapter outlines the problem of our current linear model, and introduces the Circular Economy framework. The shift from consumer towards that of user is explored through three case studies that illustrate the importance of Product-Service-Systems to achieve circularity and the role service design has to play towards the Circular Economy. The last chapter discusses the challenges involved in achieving a Circular Economy, and I will explain two shortcomings of the outlined framework, that from my perspective are crucial for its success.

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.[…]We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.” - Victor Lebow

PART 1 (Ever present past)

Short history lesson on our path to consumerism So, how have we been convinced to “buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like”6? Consumerism, as we know it today, is a man-made construct, originally a product of the First Industrial Revolution. Any great economic transformation to date has always occurred when humans discover new energy regimes and create new communication media to organize them. In fact, any infrastructure requires three elements interacting with each other in order to create an integer system: a communication medium, a power source, and a logistics mechanism.7 In the case of the First Industrial Revolution it was “The coming together of steam-powered printing, the telegraph, and the steampowered locomotive [that] dramatically increased the speed and dependability with which economic resources could be marshaled, transported, processed, transformed into products, and distributed to customers.”8 The Second Industrial Revolution was driven by “the discovery of oil, the invention of internal combustion engine, and the introduction of the telephone.”9 The discovery of oil brought about breakthroughs in the form of invention and subsequent synthesizing of different plastics, making it easy to produce more. New financial models like hire purchase and the introduction of the credit card (“the greatest single facilitator of overconsumption ever invented”10) gave perpetual access to an ever more materialistic society.

6. Dave Ramsey, ‘A Quote from The Total Money Makeover’ (Goodreads) <http:// www.goodreads.com/quotes/25775-we-buy-things-we-don-t-need-with-money-we-don-t> [accessed 16 August 2015]. 7. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 8. Ibid., p.46 9. Ibid., p.47 10. William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

The technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution resulted in a much more efficient way of producing goods. Subsequently, the increase in productivity led to overproduction. For the first time, supply outstripped demand. Industrialized societies faced the choice of either producing less, or people would have to start consuming more.11 There were different views on this issue. The cornflake magnate W.K. Kellogg and the economist Arthur Dahlberg, for example, preferred the solution of producing less. Others, like President Hoover and GM Motors CEO Alfred Sloan, thought of the problem not as producing too much, but as consuming too little.12 The success of propaganda used during the war led to “the intelligent few”13 realizing that propaganda-like tools and methods could also be used in times of peace. These “consumption engineers”, namely people like Earnest E. Calkins, Victor Lebow, and Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), envisioned a world in which people consume and dispose of products at an ever accelerating pace, while finding spiritual satisfaction in this act. Their work was mainly channeled through strategies of psychology that gave birth to modern public relations, advertising and marketing.

“Goods fall into two classes: those that we use, such as motor cars or safety razors, and those that we use up, such as toothpaste or soda biscuits. Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”14 14

11. James Wallman, Stuffocation : Living More with Less (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 80 12. Wallman, p. 81 13. Michael Roller, ‘Diabolical Consumerism: Mass Psychology and Social Production between the Gilded and the Golden Ages’, in Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology (Springer Science + Business Media, 2015), pp. 25–50 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_2>. 14. ‘Earnest Elmo Calkins’, Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2015) <https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Earnest_Elmo_Calkins> [accessed 26 July 2015].

Advertising hasn’t only convinced people to buy more things, it has been crucial in the development of packaging design, where a single product in the supermarket has to compete against every other just by the look and feel of its shell design. The average consumer decides which product to buy in a matter of seconds. In product design, leading figures like Steven Brooks, advocated for “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”15 Planned obsolescence meant designing products that should be thrown away as quickly as possible to be replaced even before its predecessor had reached the dump.16 The second strategy, prevailed obsolescence, aimed at convincing people to upgrade their products, even if the original ones were still in perfect order.17 Design mainly contributed to this, as yearly changes in look and feel of products reinforced people’s desire to always have the latest model. However, condemning all of our societal problems to the last century seems somehow unfair. It is important to understand that conspicuous consumption and the generation of waste is inarguably inherently human. In the fascinating read Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage, the authors excuse our wasteful manners: “Those who condemn our own era for its conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste should at least bear in mind that throwing away perfectly good objects seems to be one of those inexplicable things, like ignoring history, that human beings have always done.”18

15. Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health - and a Vision for Change, Kindle Edition (Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2010), p. 161 16. Ibid., p.161 17. storyofstuffproject, ‘Story of Stuff (2007, OFFICIAL Version)’, YouTube (YouTube, 2009) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM> [accessed 2 August 2015]. 18. Rathje and Murphy, p.38

“…a garbage problem is in some respects the price we pay for having learned to do some important things very well”.19 This supports the idea that consuming and discarding products at a fast pace can also be seen from another perspective: disposable hospital syringes or sterile rubber gloves eliminate the need for costly autoclaves. In developing countries, easily disposable medical instruments become useful, as on the one hand sterilization might not be possible, and on the other it allows so many people access to cheap healthcare who would otherwise not have it. Design has played a major role in creating many of the environmental problems we face today. In the words of Papanek20:

“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.” Consumption as such is not the root of our evil, and consumers are not to be blamed solely. It is the system in which we live that has not been smart in thinking about how to design products that co-exist with our wasteful habits, considering the irrationality of human behaviour, and proposing solutions for a more sustainable economic and ecological model.

In the next chapter, I will briefly introduce how our current economic model works and continue my argument in favour of a new framework, namely the Circular Economy by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Furthermore, I will explain why (service) design as a discipline is central in the transition towards this model. Three real-life case studies of companies who are achieving circularity through design are presented to support the argument.

19. Rathje and Murphy, p.40 20. Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972) <http://playpen.icomtek.csir.co.za/~acdc/education/Dr_Anvind_Gupa/ Learners_Library_7_March_2007/Resources/books/designvictor.pdf> [accessed 13 August 2015].

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of eath’s greenings. Now, think.” -Hildegard von Bingen

PART 2 (Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re walking on the wild side, running down a one way street)

It’s a linear model

Our current economic model has not seen any change beyond the fundaments that were instituted during the Industrial Revolution. It is still a linear model that extracts the finite resources of our planet to produce goods, which after only a short period of time (think about the actual time you own a plastic water bottle - 5 minutes if you are very thirsty?) are discarded. In order to sustain the system, it needs to grow: we need to produce more ‘stuff’ in order to grow our economy. President Bush is cited many times over in the aftermath of 9/11, urging people to go shopping.21 The cultural shift that happened in the last century and which has characterized us as consumers as opposed to users, prevails today more than ever.

Figure 6. Linear Economy, adapted by the author

21. Robert H Zieger, ‘“Uncle Sam Wants You. .. to Go Shopping”: A Consumer Society Responds to National Crisis, 1957-2001’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 34 (2004), 83–103 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crv.2004.0007>., p. 94

Our current, linear ‘take, make, dispose’ model, relies heavily on large quantities of easily accessible resources and energy, and as such is “increasingly unfit for the reality in which it operates.”22 Progressively, the access and the prices of crucial resources are starting to become volatile in the marketplace, resulting in a higher exposure to risk for many companies. From 2000-2010, the real prices of natural resources rose constantly, effectively obliterating real price declines that had happened over the past century.23 Despite the fact that since 2010 prices have again decreased, it would be very short sighted to not acknowledge the foreseeable upward turning point that will inevitably happen at some point in the future.

Figure 7: ‘Take-make-dispose’, by the author

The output of our current economic system, as the graph shows, is waste. In the production chain of goods, for example, huge volumes of materials are lost between the mining process and final manufacturing. According to the Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI), each year about 21 billion tonnes of materials are not physically incorporated into products that are manufactured in OECD countries.24 This means that resources are extracted for 22. ‘Building Blocks Of A Circular Economy - Circular Economy Design & Circular Economy Business Models’ <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ circular-economy/building-blocks> [accessed 26 August 2015]. 23. Towards the Circular Economy Vol. 1 (http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation. org/business/reports: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012) <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports> [accessed 15 August 2015], p.14 24. Ibid., p.15

production, but not all of them are used in manufacturing, for example, overburden materials from mining, or by-catch from fishing. The linear system also encourages a critical mass of endof-life waste, as most materials have very low recovery rates after their first functional life is over. That is illustrated by the 2.7 billion tonnes of waste generated by Europe in 2010, of which only 40% was either reused, recycled, composted or digested.25 The alarmingly low percentage of recycled materials is largely due to the design of the products themselves: they are not designed to be disassembled and many of them contain such a high mix of materials that it is not economically feasible or materially possible to separate them. The linear system is also heavily dependent on cheap fossil fuels, which hinders incentives to produce goods with better material recovery strategies. The disposal of products to landfills leads to any residual energy being lost, while the incineration or recycling of goods recovers a small amount of energy. Reuse, however, saves significantly more energy than the previous two end-of-life strategies. It seems illogical, then, that we continue to extract raw materials to produce new goods, firstly since the energy needed to produce them is the most intensive in the ‘upstream parts of the supply chain’, i.e. the extraction process. More importantly, however, because we have already extracted so many raw materials which can be found in current products (i.e. metals in mobile phones), that reusing them would be a much more (economically and ecologically) sound way of accessing them. 26

“Every mobile phone is made from approximately 40 different elements, including copper in the wiring, indium in the touchscreen and gold in the circuit boards. It is estimated there is five times more gold in a tonne of electronic waste than there is in a tonne of mined ore from a gold mine.”26 25. Towards the Circular Economy Vol. 1 (http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation. org/business/reports: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012) <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports> [accessed 15 August 2015], p.15 26. Investigating the Role of Design in the Circular Economy (www.greatrecovery.org.uk, 1 June 2013) <http://www.greatrecovery.org.uk/resources/ the-great-recovery-report/> [accessed 22 August 2015], p.9

Currently there are many efforts being made to improve the linear system, namely increasing efficiency, looking for new sources of supply, or simply calling for consumers to consume less. This last strategy, consuming less, is one which I found very appealing while discovering the possibilities of turning my life into one of ‘zero waste’: reducing the refuse I produce but also adopting the philosophy of minimalism in order to lessen any unnecessary clutter. Gaining perspective through an experiment

The zero waste movement I mentioned in the introduction inspired me to do an experiment. I framed my research project following the basic principles of the 5 R’s27: 1. Refuse what you do not need 2. Reduce what you do need 3. Reuse what you consume 4. Recycle what you cannot refuse 5. Rot (compost) I saw this as a research opportunity to understand what it takes to change your behavior and what the challenges might be to reduce the amount of waste created by me that would end up in landfill. For a couple of weeks I tried my best: I only bought food that didn’t come packaged in plastic. This was the greatest challenge of them all, as everything in the supermarket comes packaged in plastic. My awareness alarm rose. Avocados are sold separately, but also in plastic packaging in sets of two. Sweet potatoes ditto. Courgettes ditto ditto. I bought everything I could that didn’t contain any plastic and when I got to the till, people behind me were angry and impatient because it took the cashier so long to weigh all of my fruit and vegetables. I couldn’t buy any meat or fish off the shelf, and even the fishmonger at Waitrose packages your fish in plastic, papers and bags. So I took my own container and asked them to put the meat in there. The second time I went there, they refused. In my fierce attempt to win and find a way to buy more plastic-free produce, I went all the way to Whole Foods, just to discover that my shopping 27. ‘How to Get Started’ <http://www.zerowastehome.com/2011/09/how-to-getstarted.html> [accessed 26 July 2015].

expenses had doubled. I looked up farmer’s markets, and although in the area around Holborn there are a couple, they are not accessible enough (because of opening hours or distance) or big enough to prevent me from going to the supermarket at the end of the day. I transported my food in cotton bags. To reduce my waste from make up and personal hygiene I cut out old t-shirts and used them as makeup remover, instead of cotton pads. I stopped buying clothes. I bought shea butter and coconut oil and experimented with doing my own body lotion. I bought mason jars to store my creams and my food. Most significantly I bought a stainless steel bottle, to carry around water instead of my daily plastic bottle purchase. I called Camden Council to request a composting bin. This was a couple of weeks ago already, but so far, no bin. I decluttered my room and put everything I thought I didn’t need in a bag with the promise to either sell, recycle, give away, or discard anything I hadn’t used in a months’ time. But all of that was not enough: I would have needed to start producing my own make up, donate half of my wardrobe, travel further to find better farmer’s markets, etc. To cut to the chase: reaching a zero waste household, at least in a way portrayed by bloggers (Bea Johnson or Lauren Singer) and in a city like London, is pretty complicated. Not impossible, but it requires a lot of effort, planning (=time) and “giving up”. This already hints at the fact that the zero waste movement will never become mainstream, because people are not prepared to forgo the convenience in their lives for the sake of the environment. Documentaries such as The Clean Bin Project and Zero Impact Man both portray the story of a couple who set the challenge of living with zero waste and additionally, zero CO2 impact (‘No impact man’). What I understood from my own short experiment and from the experiences presented in those documentaries are two things:

Revelation 1

The (capitalist) system we live in doesn’t make it easy for us to change our behaviour, as it is “underpinned by a consumer culture which, in turn, is upheld by materialistic values.”28 To reject the modern world like American author Henry David Thoreau in 1845 (he lived in the woods at the edge of his home town for two years), is probably fun for a limited period of time, but it is not realistic enough to become a long-term life choice.29 He eventually returned to civilization. And more than being of little stimulus, living a simple life is actually very complicated. Not only because it is difficult to plan for, but because doing the right thing is not always easy. We don’t actually have enough knowledge at our disposal to make informed choices and there are always two sides to every argument. For example, using a biodegradable plastic bag might make us think we are doing the right thing, but we could just be deceiving ourselves. Producing it requires growing a lot of corn, hence energy and resources go into the farming of it. Cornstarch weakens plastic, so extra plastic needs to be added to biodegradable plastic products to ensure that they possess the same qualities (i.e. strength), as the ones they are replacing. Finally, biodegradable plastic eventually falls apart, but this can only happen with the presence of sunlight, a rather scarce commodity in landfills.30

Revelation 2

Even if I achieve zero waste and a minimalist lifestyle, the system around me stays the same. Everything that is available to us has been designed to be consumed and disposed of almost immediately; it has a built-in obsolescence as its main goal. And perhaps the biggest problem of becoming a minimalist is the nature of the idea itself: it is more defined by what it is not - materialism, that is - than by what it is.31 It is like driving a car, “going straight ahead, along the same road, but pushing the brake pedal as hard as you can, and most likely with both feet.”32

28. James Wallman, Stuffocation : Living More with Less (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 123 29. James Wallman, Stuffocation : Living More with Less (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2015), p.134 30. Rathje and Murphy, p. 165 31. Wallman, p.123 32. Ibid., p.124

It seems to me that many of the current efforts towards sustainability are simply engineered to buy the system some time. In reality we are not changing or challenging the status quo, we are just delaying the inevitable. My conclusion is that waste, simply put, is design gone wrong. Our society faces a design challenge, and I will address the issue of the role of (service) design and the responsibility of designers towards questioning a system that is so evidently flawed. But first, I would like to introduce the concept of the Circular Economy, a framework that unlike our current linear system, aims to create a closed loop economy, in which resources are seen as food, not as waste.

Figure 8 (above): ‘Drawer 3’, Andrea Fischer, 2015 Figure 9 (left): ‘Drawer 1’, Andrea Fischer, 2015

Note: These pictures belong to the research process of the experiment: the decluttering mission. I took everything out of the drawers, sorted it, photographed it, and put everything I didn’t think was either useful or necessary in my life in a separate bag. So far I have taken only one thing out.

The Circular Economy ”If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist”33 Cradle-to-cradle

“This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients.”36

Cradle-to-cradle34 is the most prominent philosophy for a new framework in which humans interact within their economy as nature does with the whole ecosystem. Instead of a linear system, the approach envisions a circular model consisting of two separate metabolisms, a biological and a technical one. Other schools of thought exist as well, but for the purpose of this dissertation I am going to introduce the model of the Circular Economy (CE) by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It is inspired, amongst others, by the Cradle-to-Cradle philosophy and in my view it is the most comprehensive framework so far, summarizing the current thinking and the existing knowledge very simply. According to Ken Webster, the Circular Economy framework is “more than an economic opportunity. It’s about a way of looking at the world.”35 (Cradle-to-cradle: “This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients.”36 )

33. Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle (London: VINTAGE, 2009), pp. 103-104 34. Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle (London: VINTAGE, 2009) 35. GoldenBrent, ‘Ken Webster - Systems Thinking, Education & the Circular Economy’ (Dailymotion, 2015) <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2vp41n> [accessed 22 August 2015]. 36. ‘Dictionary of Sustainable Management’ <http://www.sustainabilitydictionary.com/cradle-to-cradle/> [accessed 26 August 2015].

Let’s start with the definition of the Circular Economy:

“A circular economy is one that is restorative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles.”37 Instead of an ‘end-of-life’ or ‘grave’, this model envisions a shift towards renewable energies, the elimination of toxic chemicals that hinder reuse, and it advocates for the elimination of waste through “the superior design of materials, products, systems, and, within this, business models”38

Mining / materials manufacturing

Farming / collection

Materials / parts manufacturer

Biological materials

Biochemical feedstock

Technical materials

Product manufacturer

Soil restoration

Recycle Retail / service provider Refurbish/ remanufacture Reuse / redistribute

Biogas

Cascades

Maintain

CONSUMER

Anaerobic digestion / composting

USER

Collection

Extraction of biochemical feedstock

Collection

Energy recovery

Leakage -- to be minimised Landﬁll

figure 10: ‘The Circular Economy - an Industrial System That Is Restorative by Design’, 2013.

37. ‘The Circular Economy Concept - Regenerative Economy’ <http://www. ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/overview/concept> [accessed 26 August 2015]. 38. Towards the Circular Economy vol. 1 (http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation. org/business/reports: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012) <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports> [accessed 15 August 2015].

The framework, shaped like a butterfly, is composed of a biological system on the left, where everything circulates to enter the biosphere safely, restoring natural capital; and a technical system, in which everything circulates at high quality infinitely, without entering the biosphere.39 Within the technical system, four principles drive four sources of value creation40: 1. The power of the inner circle, which refers to the reduction of material usage compared to the linear system. The tighter the circle, the more savings, in terms of material, labour, energy and capital. 2. The power of circling longer: maximizing the amount of cycles materials/products go through, either by reuse, manufacturing or recycling; or the amount of time within each of these cycles, e.g. extending the use of a washing machine from 1,000 to 10,000 cycles. 3. The power of cascaded use, which translates into the expansion of reuse across the value chain, e.g. when cotton clothing is re-used as second hand clothing, but then passes over to the furniture industry, and when its purpose is fulfilled there, it is used as insulation material for construction, until it is finally released safely into the biosphere. 4. And finally, the power of pure circles, in which uncontaminated material streams lead to the ability to reuse them without the loss of quality, e.g. non-toxic carpet tiles that can be recycled effortlessly.

biomimicry

Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.41

The basic idea of a system that is restorative by intent is not new. The concept of biomimicry is essential to the understanding of the Circular Economy, as therein lies the answer to some of the greatest challenges in our current system. Biomimicry, in its broadest sense, is the essence of design. Any great design proposal solves a problem by understanding it holistically, and what better way of designing than by learning from a system that has had millions of years of trial and error? 41 39. Towards the Circular Economy Vol. 1 (http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation. org/business/reports: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012) <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports> [accessed 15 August 2015], p. 22 40. Ibid., p.7 41. ‘What Is Biomimicry? – Biomimicry Institute’ (Biomimicry Institute) <http://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/#.VdiAMUI9Xdk> [accessed 22 August 2015].

“You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8 billion year research and development period. And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it.” -Michael Pawlyn

The Circular Economy consequently, by taking insights from living systems and nature, seeks to optimize systems, not components. Is it feasible?

At first, skeptics might dismiss the CE as it not only appears too radical to implement, but it seems to imply that a change in circular business models comes at a great financial cost for companies. Consulting firm McKinsey analysed the implications of costs for companies taking this leap.42 Illustrating the case with a ubiquitous product, the mobile phone, they wanted to understand the profitability of the different approaches comprised in the circles of the technical system of the CE (reuse, remanufacture and recycle). Reuse, unsurprisingly, proved to be the most valuable strategy with a recovered value of $6 per phone after deducting costs. Recycling showed low value with around about $0.10 per phone, and remanufacture resulted in a loss, since it costs more to do (-$1.4) than the value that can be recovered from it. This explains why companies at present have systems in place in which they recover our old mobile phones, try to resell them or simply recycle them. However, there is no financial incentive for them to remanufacture the phone and recover the valuable material resources, like gold and copper, as this would be too expensive. Within a Circular Economy, however, the rules of the game change because a mobile phone wouldn’t be designed the traditional way. Already at the design stage decisions would be made as to how the phone can be disassembled easily to either repair or replace faulty pieces, extending its useful life. Also, decisions such as how to re42. TEDx Talks, ‘Circular Economy -- System Perspectives for a New Enlightenment: Ella Jamsin at TEDxLiege’, YouTube (YouTube, 2014) <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ucTiaS7kh2k> [accessed 1 September 2015].

cycle its parts easier, recover its materials and retain the valuable resources to produce the next generation of phones would be addressed at the early stages of development. The second analysis of McKinsey then took into account these changes in design and treatment of the resources. It turns out that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;reuseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is still the most valuable strategy, with a recovered value of $6.9 per phone. Recycling becomes much more profitable than before with now $1.3 per phone, but most surprisingly, remanufacturing yields a recovered value of $2.5 per phone.

Value in USD per

Reuse

Remanufacture

Recycle

6.2

6.9

-1.4

2.5

0.1

1.3

Linear economy

vs.

Circular Economy

figure 11: value in USD per phone, adapted by the author

The bottom line is: the Circular Economy not only makes environmental sense, it can also yield economic profit.

Transitioning towards a Circular Economy

In one way or another, the transition towards a Circular Economy has already begun, pioneered by disruptive business models that are part of what is currently known as The Sharing Economy. Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, are just a few of the most famous examples that make a case in point: a shift, unprecedented to this time, is happening in the way people use things and those things, for the biggest part, are services. What the customer is ultimately purchasing is the function instead of the traditional product. 43

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” 43 However, the above mentioned companies are mostly concerned with the second loop of the CE: reuse and redistribute. On that level, they are becoming highly efficient in reusing and sharing places, transport systems and entertainment etc. The old paradigm that a company can be competitive just through its products has been set aside by the evidence of the service economy. The reality is hard to miss. In the UK, for example, the service sector contributed to 79.6% of the national GDP in 2014.44 Services are becoming increasingly important, also in terms of sustainability. In the next section, I will look at the role of (service) design in the transition towards a Circular Economy.

43. Tom Goodwin, ‘The Battle Is For The Customer Interface’ (TechCrunch, 2015) <http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battleis-all-for-the-customer-interface/#.asaeuo:NZA4> [accessed 1 September 2015]. 44. ‘Indicator Metadata’ <http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TETC.ZS> [accessed 22 September 2015].

Service Design and the Circular Economy “Design will play a key role in the transition to a circular economy. We need to educate and inspire the design industry to take up this challenge.”45 Explaining what service design is, even after a year of studies at the RCA, is not an easy undertaking. This is a shared problem amongst my peers and many other people in the design community. Sometimes, when I have to explain it in an occasion where my explanation actually counts, I shift nervously in my seat, trying to find the right words. I find comfort, however, in the sentences of Stickdorn & Schneider46: “Service design is an interdisciplinary approach that combines different methods and tools from various disciplines. […] Service design is an evolving approach, this is particularly apparent in the fact that, as yet, there is no common definition or clearly articulated language of service design.” Richard Buchanan, actually sees this as a positive thing, as “Fields in which definition is now a settled matter tend to be lethargic, dying, or dead fields, where inquiry no longer provides challenges to what is accepted as truth.”47 For the sake of this dissertation, however, I will define service design as the shaping of experiences that are meaningful and relevant for people, while at the same time improving the quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.48

45. Investigating the Role of Design in the Circular Economy (www.greatrecovery.org.uk, 1 June 2013) <http://www.greatrecovery.org.uk/resources/ the-great-recovery-report/> [accessed 22 August 2015]. 46. Jakob Schneider and Marc Stickdorn, This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases (Netherlands: Book Industry Services (BIS), 2011), p. 29 47. Schneider and Stickdorn, p. 28 48. ‘What Is Service Design?’ (SDN, 2009) <http://www.service-design-network. org/intro/> [accessed 13 September 2015].

“In this is the recognition that the nature of service design is not to produce a product, but to ‘co-create value’ for customers, service providers and other involved stakeholders.”49 Service design is inherently interdisciplinary, as it borrows tools and thinking from many other disciplines. One of the main characteristics of this design practice is the fact that the user is always at the centre, and the design problem is approached from a holistic point of view.

Servitisation

“describes the strategy of creating value by adding services to products or even replacing a product with a service.”50 For example, contracting types by the kilometre to a hauling company instead of selling it to them

Productisation

“When a service based business packages up services as products to make them more accessible”. For example, accounting services that package a service e.g. startup package, VAT returns, Yearly accounts, as a fixed price deal51

The nature of service design puts the discipline in a good position to contribute to designing for the Circular Economy. As products become more servitised and services become more productised, the gap between the traditional product based company and the service oriented business has been blurred to form a new kind of business model called produt-service system (PSS). PSS is defined as “tangible products and intangible services designed and combined so that they jointly are capable of fulfilling specific customer needs.”50 51 52

In literature PSS is praised for enhancing competitiveness and for concurrently fostering sustainability.53 This is because PSS often replaces a product with a service in order to fulfill a need, therefore eliminating many of the issues, like actually creating and manufacturing a product. Tukker54 summarizes the classifications of PSS into three main categories:

49. John Darzentas and Jenny S. Darzentas, Systems Thinking for Service Design: A Natural Partnership to Understand, Manage and Use Complexity, 2014 <http://systemic-design.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/RSD3-2014_working_ paper_-15-final_Darzentas_John.pdf> [accessed 4 September 2015], p. 3 50. Arnold Tukker, ‘Eight Types of Product–service System: Eight Ways to Sustainability? Experiences from SusProNet’, Business Strategy and the Environment, 13 (2004), 246–60 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bse.414>. 51. Nick Frank, ‘What Is Servitisation?’ <http://productserviceinnovation.com/ home/2010/09/10/what-is-servitisation/> [accessed 13 September 2015]. 52. Electrication, ‘Productising Your Services’, 2015 <http://www.slideshare.net/ Electrication/productising-your-services> [accessed 13 September 2015]. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid.

Product-service system

Value mainly in product content

Service content (intangible)

Product content (tangible)

Pure product

A: Product oriented

B: Use oriented

1. Product related

3. Product lease

2. Advice and consultancy

4. Product renting/sharing 5. Product pooling

C: Result oriented

Value mainly in service content

Pure service

6. Activity management 4. Pay per service unit 5. Functional result

Figure 12: Main and subcategories of PSS, adapted by the author

1. Product-oriented services: The main aim of such a company is still to sell products, but with the addition of extra services. 2. Use-oriented series: In this business model, products still play an important role, but the main aim is not selling a product, but providing the access to it. Products remain in the ownership of the provider, and it is made available to the market otherwise, for example through leasing, sharing, pay-per-service or product pooling. 3. Result-oriented services: This is the most radical of all, since there is no fixed product involved, but an agreement between provider and the customer on a deliverable result. Each category has sub-categories, but these are not highly relevant for the current discussion. In order to understand the differences of the three main categories, I will present three short case studies that illustrate these types of PSS.

1. PATAGONIA

Product-oriented service

Patagonia is undoubtedly one of the most fierce advocates for sustainability and the elimination of planned obsolescence. Designed to last, Patagonia carefully chooses the materials for its outdoor products and promises its customers that products will last a lifetime.

Figures 13 and 14: Advertising of Patagonia

Its latest advertising campaign “Don’t buy this jacket” urges people to reconsider buying another jacket. This might seem controversial, as the company profits from its sales, but Patagonia has many services in place that contribute to a sustainable business model. Even if their products are designed to last, wear and tear throughout the years is inevitable. That is why the brand repairs gear at no extra cost. It currently employs 45 full-time repair technicians at their facility in Reno, making it the largest garment repair facility in North America.55 55. ‘Patagonia’s Worn Wear’ <http://www.patagonia.com/us/common-threads/> [accessed 14 September 2015].

figure 15: Patagonia repair manuals on ifixit.com

Besides that, the company encourages its customers to repair items themselves. One way to do this is by publishing repair manuals for their products on ifixit.com, one of the largest DIY fixing platforms. This has led to reduced warranty costs, as the ownership of repair shifts from their depots to customers themselves. Once customers no longer need a Patagonia product, the brand encourages customers to give their gear away through Yerdle, a new sharing platform. Also, a partnership with eBay allows people to sell their used Patagonia clothes in the Patagonia eBay store. Worn apparel is also accepted at the Portland retail store through an innovative trade-in program. Finally, recycling schemes are well in place for people to send items back to Patagonia (they pay for the postage) so they can recycle or repurpose the materials. This example is of course an extreme case, because Patagonia has a corporate culture that is geared towards sustainability and an extremely loyal and niche customer segment. If this wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the case, I am not sure how much the extra services would actually contribute in a transition towards circularity.

2. MUd Jeans

Use-oriented service

There are many examples of leasing and sharing products nowadays, especially with the help of technology, but in fashion it is still a very difficult undertaking. Fast fashion has created a market for cheap, low-quality and rapidly disposable clothing. This eliminates any kind of incentive to produce longer-lasting textiles, and consumers have perpetual access to new clothing. Recovery rates for textiles is quite low, with only around 25% of textiles recovered in the EU per year.56 When you think that producing one pair of jeans requires 8,000 liters of water57, we don’t need more evidence to illustrate the huge loss of resources as these jeans end their life in a landfill site. Fighting against this is a small company from the Netherlands: MUD Jeans. They are rethinking the way we can share one of the most iconic and endlessly stylish products of our time. The company uses cotton from organic sources, cares for a fair supply chain and working conditions, and reuses cotton from old jeans to produce new ones, which also results in less water used for production.

figure 16: MUD Jeans, printed label

Besides purchasing jeans, customers can also choose to lease the cotton. For €7.50 per month they receive any pair of jeans they like and after a year, they can either keep them or send them back and choose a new pair for leasing. Returned jeans are then washed and if necessary repaired, and finally sold as vintage pieces at a lower price 56. ‘Mud Jeans - Case Studies’ (Ellen MacArthur Foundation) <http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/case_studies/mud-jeans> [accessed 17 September 2015]. 57. ‘About Us’ (Mud Jeans) <http://www.mudjeans.eu/about/> [accessed 17 September 2015].

on their online store. Customers always have incentives to send no longer wanted clothing back, as they get a voucher for their next purchase. Repairs during the leasing time are always free, as it is part of the service. Leasing is currently one of the most popular business models emerging as part of the sustainability movement. However, it is important to understand it is not the ultimate CE panacea, because it is not a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;one size fits allâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; kind of solution. Smaller companies might especially struggle to implement this, as it typically involves a big outlay of cash at the beginning (sourcing materials, designing and manufacturing the jeans, for example) and there is an inherent risk as it involves a long-term relationship and loyalty between customer and company.58 figure 17: The sartorial circle of MUD Jeans 1 11

THE CIRCLE OF MUD

8 6 7

58. katie Beverley, Personal Interview for Circular Economy + Service Design Dissertation, 2015.

Figure 18: RAU Architects office with Pay per Lux system

3. PHILIPS

Result-oriented service

RAU Architects contacted Philips as they were about to fit their Amsterdam office. Inherent to their sustainability values, RAU wanted to design their office space considering light as an asset that should, for the most part, be natural and use as little artificial light as possible. They challenged Philips to offer them a service aiming for performance-based consumption. That is, they didn’t want to buy expensive lighting systems they would have to discard in the future. They just wanted to have light. 59

“I told Philips, ‘Listen, I need so many hours of light in my premises every year. If you think you need a lamp, or electricity, or whatever – that’s fine. But I want nothing to do with it. I’m not interested in the product, just the performance. I want to buy light, and nothing else.”58 -Thomas Rau 59. ‘Philips & Turntoo - Case Studies’ (Ellen MacArthur Foundation) <http:// www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/case_studies/philips-and-turntoo#accessed 14.09> [accessed 14 September 2015].

Philips developed a new light plan for RAU, as well as adapted LED luminaire for ceiling systems, which deliver effective and adjustable illumination in the areas where it is actually needed.60 Furthermore, intelligent sensors control the light and brighten or dim it when needed in response to motion or amount of daylight. Energy reduction following installation

Optimization after installation

100%

WEEKLY CONSUMPTION (kWh)

400

90% 350

80%

300

70% 60%

250

50% 200

40%

150

30%

100

20%

Figure 19: Benefits of the Circular Economy for RAU Architects

10%

0 old situation

March

April

May

June

July

August September

The benefits for RAU Architects are clear: the project achieved a 55% energy reduction in total, of which 35% are the result of the LED systems installation, while the other 20% stem from post installation optimization by Philips, as part of the same service. The project was so successful that Philips named the service “Pay per Lux” and it is now being adapted by many other companies, as well as entire cities like Washington61. After this project, Philips is not only the owner of a new business model that promises attractive market potential, it is also able to control the end-of-life stream of its products much more efficiently, reclaiming valuable resources for new use.

60. <http://www.lighting.philips.com/pwc_li/main/shared/assets/downloads/ casestudy-rau-int.pdf> [accessed 14 September 2015]. 61. ‘Philips Introduces “Lighting as a Service”’ <http://www.sustainablebusiness. com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/25461> [accessed 14 September 2015].

learnings

The conclusion we can draw from these three examples is that services play a central role in the transition towards a Circular Economy. As complexity increases, and it certainly does within a model like the CE, in which not only people but materials and whole systems have to be considered as part of the design solution, it is necessary for designers to shift from a product design oriented approach to service design. However, just designing a service doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t guarantee a sustainable outcome. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In every case a careful consideration needs to be made in order to design the package of products and services, which in that particular case is the most sustainable solution.â&#x20AC;?62 This might hint towards the fact that services alone are not enough to have a big impact, and disruptors like ifixit.com are great, but are also not able to address the problem as a whole. Human behavior is an important factor that designers need to understand in order to provide solutions that are not only ecologically sound, but that will actually be adopted. There is no point in designing a service that leases toasters, for example, if people do not see the value of the proposition.

62. J.C. Brezet and others, The Design of Eco-Efficient Services (Delft University of Technology, June 2001) <http://score-network.org/files/806_1.pdf> [accessed 12 September 2015], p.9

â&#x20AC;&#x153;To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in scienceâ&#x20AC;? - Einstein

PART 3 (Be the ocean when it meets the sky)

IMPLEMENTING THE Circular Economy FRAMEWORK Arguably, the biggest question in this discussion is: “Well, the CE framework is all well and good on paper, but how can this actually be implemented in practice?” I find that there is little in literature about how the framework itself can actually be applied, especially from a design point of view. The butterfly model is a diagram that fulfills its purpose: to simplify a very complex subject so that it is visually digestible and cognitively comprehensible. In reality, however, it is not as black and white, due to the fact that products can often be both biological and technical, like wood chips that are combined with synthetic resin, thereby becoming ‘technical’.63 The execution of a truly circular business model is certainly not easy, as every product or service sits within an ecosystem that is often complex and involves many different interrelated stakeholders. Furthermore, there are many challenges and barriers to achieving circularity (financial, legal, institutional, political, infrastructural, technological, behavioral, etc.)64, which only enforce the argument for collaboration across disciplines, but also, a holistic approach. Of all the current challenges, I will elaborate on two that, in my view, are fundamentally underdressed in the framework of the CE: the importance of systems thinking, and the lack of the user’s perspective at the core of the model.

63. Conny Bakker and others, Products That Last. Product Design for Circular Business Models (TU Delft: TU Delft, 2014), p. 41 64. Note: These challenges are central to a successful implementation of CE, however, the breath of their topics are too wide to be tackled individually in this paper.

CHALLENGE 1 Systems thinking

“a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the natural processes of the natural and economic world”64

More and more, the design community mentions the need for designers to become proficient in systems thinking.

Systems thinking is founded in the field of system dynamics from MIT, and in essence focuses on how parts of a system (e.g. nature: air, water, plants and animals, etc.) interact with one another. Instead of looking at small parts in isolation as Descartes reductionist theory66 does, systems thinking expands its view to take into account “larger and larger numbers of interactions as an issue is being studied.”67 This characteristic makes systems thinking extremely effective in tackling very complex problems such as healthcare or pollution, as it takes into account the dependence between individual parts or actions that make up the bigger picture. For example, insect pests are a known problem in farming as they destroy crops. The traditional linear approach would be to try to solve the issue by using pesticides to eliminate the insects. The more pesticide is applied, the less the crop is damaged. As a consequence however, water, air and soil are also polluted. In regards to the insects, this is a short term solution as soon more insects (B) populate and damage the crops. From a systems perspective this can be explained by looking beyond the original breed of insects (A). Insects A were controlling the population of insects B by preying or competing with them. As the pesticides eliminated population A, insects B now have no natural predator and attack the crops. The pesticide developed for group A is no longer effective on group B, and the whole process starts again. A systems solution might try to solve the problem by introducing population B to the existing population A in the crops, therefore creating a natural predator and eliminating the use of pesticides. As a side benefit, soil and water pollution are avoided.68

65. ‘Systems Thinking - Tool/Concept/Definition’ <http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/SystemsThinking.htm> [accessed 17 September 2015]. 66. ‘Reductionism’, Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2015) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Reductionism> [accessed 17 September 2015]. 67. Daniel Aronson, 1996 <http://www.thinking.net/Systems_Thinking/OverviewSTarticle.pdf> [accessed 17 September 2015]. 68. Ibid., [accessed 17 September 2015].

Systems thinking is therefore an essential lens designers need to learn to look through. When it comes to the design of products and services for the CE, the answer might not always be the most obvious one. To illustrate this, I will exemplify the paradox that often occurs when we talk about environmentally friendly products. WHY GREEN IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER

The demand and the awareness towards conscious, green, eco-friendly, toxic-free and/or sustainable products has been on the rise in the last couple of years. In general, anything that is green, seems to be perceived as better. Perhaps this is because it feeds our environmental folklore69, that innate framework that helps us decide what is good for the environment. Unfortunately, very often products and services are green-washed, but we continue to buy them because we are either not aware of the truth or because we want to believe that we are doing something good, quietly clearing our conscience. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s look at the example of a choice we are all pretty much familiar with: the choice between taking a plastic bag or a paper bag at the supermarket checkout. The first impulse of most people would be to say that the paper bag is better because it comes from wood, a natural resource, and it can be recycled. The plastic bag might trigger mental images of a turtle tangled in plastic in the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch, and this is a sad truth and by no means a less important issue to address. But people often do not consider the alternative: in order to produce paper bags, trees need to be cut down, resulting in huge areas of deforestation, causing thousand of animal species to lose their natural habitat as well. The environmental folklore leads to the assumption that products that are made of biodegradable materials are good for the environment. Biodegradability, however, is a material property, not a definition of environmental benefit.70

69. Leyla Acaroglu, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Paper Beats Plastic? How to Rethink Environmental Folkloreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, 2014 <https://www.ted.com/talks/leyla_acaroglu_paper_beats_plastic_how_to_rethink_environmental_folklore?language=en> [accessed 3 August 2015]. 70. Ibid.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything at some point comes from nature, and it is how you use the material that dictates the environmental impactâ&#x20AC;? - Leyla Acaroglu

Even if in our current system, efforts towards reduction, reuse and recycling are in place, a failure to understand the complexity of the system leads to unwanted consequences. Incineration, a waste reduction strategy, is preferred to landfilling because it can create energy. However, paper and plastic, for example, release toxins when incinerated, as they were never really designed to be safely burned. Recycling often results in downcycling, like when the high-quality steel in cars is recycled and melted down with different car parts, including copper cables and paint coatings. This recycled mixture downgrades the quality of the steel so it can never be used again for making new cars. The problem of the environmental folklore and the inability to weigh the net environmental impact cannot be attributed only to us, consumers, but to the whole system, as it is not yet properly understood in regulation and environmental policy either. It must be said that is not easy to think in systems, and the current challenge is that we are woefully undereducated to do so. It is imperative to start this education from an early age, and design schools need to foster this kind of thinking, through collaboration with other disciplines, but also by providing tools that designers can use during the research and design phases so as to become more familiar with this way of thinking. Currently I have not found any tool that can be applied for designers to even visualize how systems work, and this is a very interesting opportunity for a project beyond this dissertation. CHALLENGE 2

The user at the center

Service design revolves around putting users at the center of any design activity, and it does so by borrowing tools from ethnographic research and the social sciences to interview, shadow, and observe how people behave and perform various tasks. Furthermore, co-designing with actual end-users is a popular approach, as it encourages the designer to be emphatic and it helps to prevent his/her own assumptions obscuring the potential to grasp the design challenge at hand.

“The central premise of user centred design is that the best designed products and services result from understanding the needs of the people who will use them”71 – Design Council Understanding human behavior is key to performing the act of designing. The lack thereof, combined with the shortfall in systems thinking is often the reason for failure in attempting to solve a problem. We see this all too often, as policy makers and businesses address an issue, like improving recycling rates, with rather ineffective methods. For example, the belief that a letter to residents of a community (with detailed explanations on the types of refuse that can or cannot be recycled) will drive a change in behavior resulting in improved recycling rates is almost too naive in itself. Designers might well be aware of the importance of designing for and with people, but this does not usually apply to policy makers and business people. In my opinion the CE framework, be it from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation or any other for that matter, lacks the inclusion of people and users as part of its core components. This is one of the greatest shortcomings in its vision, as it impedes (non-designers especially) to understand how to create a product or a service in a circular way that will not only provide value (is the service/product useful?), but that will be used as originally intended. By this I mean that no matter how circular a product is, if people (for whatever behavioural reason) fail to send it back to the manufacturer or to disassemble and repair it themselves, for example, then all the effort in designing a modular product or an easy take-back service has been in vain. In this discussion we assume that design is well placed to tackle sustainability challenges, and service design has been presented as a discipline that will play an important role in the transition towards more circular business models. However, although SD has adapted many methods from other disciplines to its advantage, there are to date no universally known design tools specific to the topic of sustainability. Throughout my research I have found a few agencies 71. Sebastian de Cabo, ‘Blog: The End-of-Life Customer - RSA’, 2015 <https:// www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/07/the-endof-life-customer/> [accessed 20 September 2015].

and consultant designers practicing service design in the context of the Circular Economy. I have discovered a few efforts that attempt to breach this gap, for example: Circular Business Board by We All Design: an adapted version of the Business Model Canvas for the Circular Economy Energy Trumps by The Agency of Design: a deck of cards that visualize the environmental properties of 45 materials and give designers a fast and visual informative tool for more informed material choices. Design Play Cards by Leyla Acaroglu72: a deck of cards exploring design thinking and sustainability problem solving through design. Good Design Guide by Leyla Acaroglu73: interactive PDF on design thinking and sustainability designed for use in design education. It covers design problem solving, lifecycle thinking, sustainable design strategy and poses a range of design challenges for the reader to solve. Useful Simple Projects tears down products with hammers and screw drivers in order to understand how products have been designed and what they are made of. With the help of cards that inform on the various periodical elements, they map out what products are made of and where these materials have come from. Furthermore, the teardown process helps to understand what the product’s failure mechanisms are, which is informative when looking for re-design options. These are very interesting approaches, yet they seem to be the work of a few individuals or organisations, who might not necessarily collaborate or share a platform of knowledge. Through an expert interview I learned that service design tools are being extended to

72. ‘Sustainability Provocateur | Designer | Sociologist’ <http://www.leylaacaroglu.com/#!portfolio-/ccuu> [accessed 20 September 2015]. 73. ‘Good Design Guide E-Book by Leyla Acaroglu’ <http://www.gooddesignguide.com> [accessed 22 September 2015].

Figure 20 (top left): Energy Trump Cards Figure 21 (top right): Tear down process Figure 22 (bottom left): Good Design Guide Figure 23 (bottom right): Design Play Cards

consider environmental and social impact.74 The EcoDesign Centre, for instance, adds environmental impact measures and social indicators to the service blueprint, and uses â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the environmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as a persona to understand its relationship as a stakeholder throughout the service journey. These efforts, unfortunately, are not readily being shared or published at the moment. There is a need to develop and share more methodologies for (service) designers to really grasp the issues at hand and provoke a deeper, more sustainable thinking. This is one of the provocations I hope to achieve with this dissertation: to encourage designers across various fields to share and create more design tools that will hopefully lead the design discipline to innately be more aware of its role and responsibility and truthfully act upon it.

74. Katie Beverley, Personal Interview for Circular Economy + Service Design Dissertation, 2015.

“When in doubt, choose change” -Lily Leung

CONCLUSION

THE SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE: IT’S A DESIGN ISSUE If around 80% of the environmental impact of products and services are created at the design stage75, design as a discipline can no longer shy away from the responsibility that it has towards creating better products, services and systems. Design education, to begin with, is one of the first building blocks towards a Circular Economy. Designers now work on organizational structures, social problems, and complex political issues. As Don Norman states: “Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of the knowledge already known.”76 He advocates for design education to become more rigorous, inclusive of disciplines such as natural science, behavioural and social sciences, technology and business. Designers do not need to become scientists themselves, but in order to design for the environment we need to know about science as part of our design education. If this is not the case, we will fail to design products and services that really address the core issues because of a lack of understanding from a systems point of view, but also from a human behavioural point of view. There is no point in designing a product with extremely durable materials if we know that people are going to stop using it after a year once a newer technology replaces it. It’s imperative that we become more proactive in asking questions, and that we question our own ego as designers from time to time. We should challenge the belief of the designer as a God-like figure, and become more humble in our approach to designing with people and for the environment. We can start with simple questions, like: “Do we really need this product, or is there another way of satisfying the same need?” Let’s question the decision to invent a new, better, more efficient kettle, and instead propose a more effective solution to serve a hot cup of tea. 75. John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (United States: The MIT Press, 2005). 76. ‘Why Design Education Must Change’, 2010 <http://www.core77.com/ posts/17993/why-design-education-must-change-17993> [accessed 22 September 2015].

As evidenced throughout the text, services will play an increasingly important role in the transition towards a Circular Economy. Collaboration across industries is essential to reach a better understanding of the complex systems that make up the world we live in. To deconstruct the design process and foster the participation of other disciplines, tools and methodologies are essential but currently underdeveloped. The challenge I propose is to start building a “design toolkit for Circular Economy”, which is shared openly to provide access and possibilities to anyone who wants to start creating products, services or new business models. I hope that this dissertation, which has taken me on an incredible learning journey way past beyond the starting point of turning my life zero waste; and which has inspired me to become a different, (and better) designer, will resonate with others as well. Designers! Business People! Governments! Start asking questions that challenge the current model, dare to speak that of which no ones dares to speak.

“The best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.” -Theodore Roosevelt

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Personal Interviews

Beverley, Katie. Personal Interview for Circular Economy + Service Design Dissertation, 10 September 2015. Via e-mail Brass, Clare. Interview for Circular Economy + Service Design Dissertation, 22 September 2015, via Skype.

This dissertation was printed on recycled paper.