In our materials design process we strive for two things; resource efficiency in production and carbon efficiency in the whole life cycle of the material.
So while we can and do work towards a super-efficient recycling system and internal operations everything we do is also guided by the carbon impact of the materials as they pass out from our facility and then get used by our customers, before progressing through their whole life cycle.
And the logic of that approach results in two fields of materials design; mono-materiality and co-recyclability.
There is a body of academic work on both but substantially, mono-materiality is the idea that a product’s component parts should be simplified down to as few materials as possible, where co-recyclability is the idea that if we can’t reduce the component complexity or cannot separate the components after use then we should make all those components recyclable in the same systems at end of life.
Both are firmly aimed at dramatically simplifying the challenges associated with recovery of high quality materials from end-of-life products, something we have a degree of interest in 😉
These aren’t just long words we can ignore. We’re starting to see these design concepts in everyday liquids packaging with tethered caps on soft drinks bottles and milk containers that don’t have different coloured caps to indicate the fat content. The caps must now be co-recycable with the bottles and in both cases measures have been taken to maximise the potential to recover useful raw materials.
These ideas are now a big part of auto design and fashion but they do have to start with raw materials.
All our raw products are made to be co-recyclable and to be functional across a range of manufacturing technologies so that mono-materality can be approached, if not perfected. Production designers will still need to engage with the materials early in their processes but we’ve put in the ground work to try and make their jobs easier.
Its a really complex field but we’d be happy to talk direct to any enquiry.