TL;DR: Integrate sustainability into product design as early as possible
Nobody starts a hardware company with the express goal of destroying as much of the planet as possible. However, walking through the startup room at CES, I noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, very little attention was paid to material choice, repairability, ease of disassembly, and end-of-life considerations.
It’s embarrassing, really, but as someone who used to run a hardware startup, I know it can be hard to prioritize when you have limited time and resources. However, if you can’t make earth-friendly decisions as a startup founder, when the onus literally stops with you, when will you be able to?
In an effort to find out how you can create greener hardware, we spoke with Lauryn Menard, a professor at the California College of the Arts, where she teaches the future of biodesign. She is also an advisor to Women in Design SF and co-founder and creative director of PROWL-studyan Oakland, California-based materials futures and design consultancy that focuses on sustainable solutions.
“As a startup, you have options. The point is that we live in such a capitalist society and many decisions are made based on time and money,” Menard explained. Startups want to think about sustainability, but they move at breakneck speed and try to get a product to market as soon as possible. “Startups they need to hit their target price point and all that good stuff.”
“You don’t have to adopt a new bioplastic, you can choose something that already exists: Not everything has to be made of a damn new material!” lauryn menard
But there are some important things that are moving in the market. Consumer demands are changing, and climate promises, circularity strategies, and environmental issues are surfacing. It’s hard to say if enough customers are making buying decisions based on a company’s green credentials to move the needle in any meaningful way, but product development cycles can take years, and who knows what the landscape will look like when your product hits the market. market. For some companies, it may make sense to take the risk, but other founders are starting to think differently about how products are made.
“YOfa startup is being run solely by engineers, that can be problematic – engineers tend to be concerned [about] making sure they are reaching the finish line. They put all their energy into making something work and are probably leaning into materials, ways of making and manufacturing processes that they are already familiar with,” Menard explained. “What we have seen [be] really helpful is working with a design studio that specializes in more sustainable ways of thinking and healthier materials. Or partner with someone like a materials library, so they’ve already started thinking about the functionality of the materials by the time they’re prototyping. In the same way that it takes a long time to get an MVP product that works and looks the way you want it to, sometimes it takes a long time to put a new material into an existing manufacturing process.”
thinking about sustainability
One of the big challenges we have with creating more sustainable products is that we often replace plastics with something else. The problem is that plastics are already deeply integrated into workflows. Product designers love how predictable, easy to design, and repeatable plastic is.
There’s no obvious one-for-one replacement for plastic, either; Depending on the use case and material properties you need, you may need to replace it with wool, paper, wood, plant pulp, carbon fiber, algae, hemp, mycelium, lab-grown leather, or any other available material.
Here’s what founders and product designers can do to think about sustainability and product development in a more conscious way.
