Dematerializing and Closing the Loop.
For all products and many services, substantial material and energy are consumed in the value delivery—that is, the portion of the value chain between production and eventual use and disposal. Our stewardship of our offerings thus doesn’t end at our gate, but continues over the entire product lifecycle.
Energy cannot be reincarnated, and must be drawn from renewable sources and minimized in its use in operations. But for material-intensive product- and service offerings, there are ways to achieve sustainable growth—as well as substantial cost savings—by managing the material flows. Products can be manufactured in a closed-loop manufacturing process, and services can be dematerialized.
- Closed-loop manufacturing, also called “cradle-to-cradle” manufacturing in the eponymous book, is the process of consciously designing a value offering such that the supporting material embodied in the product — the portion of it that isn’t consumed during product use — returns to the producer to be manufactured. Designing a product in this way requires changes in the product design and technology, which we’ve discussed, as well as changes in the business model. The best example of a closed-loop product currently being offered is Interface’s carpet tile.
- Dematerialization, or what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”, refers to more than providing a service with fewer and less materials: more fundamentally, it means conducting that service with the minimal amount of materials necessary. Relevant metrics here could be value per pound or value per material type. Take a look at Staples’ new InkDropSM service for an example of dematerialization in mainstream operations.
These challenges are both technological and business-related. Technologically, products must be designed for a closed-loop system, so that they can be reused, recycled or downcycled as alternatives to landfilling and incineration:
- Reuse is just what it sounds like: designing products so that they can be returned to the manufacturing process after a single use, and remade into the original product, with less cost and footprint than if virgin materials were used. This is the most preferable of these three lifecycle-governance options. Product reuse is actually the oldest “technology” here: you do this every time you put a new razor blade into your razor, or refill a mechanical pencil.
- Recycling, as we’re using it here, isn’t the curbside bottle collections that end up as speedbumps; that would more accurately be called downcycling. Recycling is when the materials from your product can be recaptured after use and, with minimal processing, be injected into the materials markets. These can be actual commodity markets for raw materials, such as metals and plastics; other companies or industries, as input to their products (“industrial ecology”); or the natural “market” of earthly materials, that is, biodegraded into biological nutrients. The former two options are referred to as technical nutrients, and the latter as biological nutrients. A well-designed product can be easily separated into these two categories. Recycling is less desirable than straight reuse. Some examples of true product recycling exist, such as using post-consumer paper fiber to make new paper.
- Downcycling, the least desirable of the three options (but still better than disposal!), is where many processes are today. The material from downcycled products is used as lower-grade raw materials for other products. The recycled plastic lumber benches, or paving material made from old tires, are examples of downcycling: these are well-intentioned, but they’re really just temporary stops on the way to a landfill.
As the examples above hint at, technological product design isn’t all that’s needed to make closed-loop production successful; we also need to change our ideas of existing business models. Read the next section to find out how Quaking Aspen helps develop innovative sustainable business models to achieve a closed-loop offering.
