Can we have our product back?

Every cloud has a silver lining. David Parker, head of remanufacturing at the Aylesbury, Bucks, based Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse (CRR) says the slow-down gives some manufacturers a chance to rethink what they're doing and embrace alternatives to the old business model – buy raw materials, make the product, sell it, and walk away. Better, says Parker, not to sell a product and forget it, but to take an interest in its continued longevity over a number of cycles. "You can redesign the product to make that a more attractive option," he says. The famous examples are Xerox and Caterpillar, to which he adds Edwards Vacuum Pumps. The genius of the idea is to turn a product into a service – and with it, a revenue stream. The starting point is to rethink the product as a ruggedised 'core' or platform on which are built sacrificial and replaceable sub-components which can be replaced as they need updating or because of wear and tear. For the users, this will become a hidden activity, says Parker. All they see is a product and they don't care whether it's new or remanufactured because the warranties that go with that item are as per the new item. That's the dream scenario, he says, but some are getting there. Edwards is a world name in the supply of vacuum pumps for semiconductor, flat panel display, chemical, metallurgical and analytical instrumentation makers and their R&D teams. A large wafer-fab plant may contain over 600 vacuum pumps. One pump failure can cost far more than the pump. Around 1990, the problem of out-of-service downtime was addressed by 'service exchange': Edwards would still sell a new pump, but on failure it would be replaced by a remanufactured unit built to the latest specifications. The recovered units would be 'remediated' as stock for field replacements. The eco-design buzz-phrase is 'up-cycling' – taking back materials or components and putting them back into your own raw materials flow. An example is the Miele washing machine, says Paul Gilbert of South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS). Washing machines used to rely on a 100-degree boil wash. Now it's 30 degrees, and the goal is ambient. A conventional washing machine is manufactured with a lowest setting of 40 degrees. Miele has designed its machine modularly so that the temperature control unit can be retro-fitted to deliver 30 degrees or ambient, as the technology becomes available. Dualit toasters is another example. The competition expects you to buy a new one if an element goes or a spring snaps. If a Dualit element goes, you tell them and they post a new one to you. "All parts fully replaceable or repairable," says Dualit's website, adding that they're 'built to last'. It's obvious why this business model appeals to the product/service provider, says Parker: "You're not having to replace 80% of the materials." Edwards began its strategy for financial, not environmental reasons – the remanufactured pumps' lower use of energy and raw materials made them cheaper for producer and customer than new ones. Now, however, Edwards sees market advantages: customers can cite the units' lower environmental footprint as benefits statements in their own CSR reports. Edwards is now applying the same techniques not just to its own products, but the remanufacture and field replacement of competitor products, too. The benefits aren't free. Edwards has had to develop systems to track all its registered components, any failures in service, and their causes, then feed the information back into current and new models. If Edwards has edged towards 'closing the loop' between old and new products, InterfaceFlor founder Ray Anderson had a clear vision of remanufacturing 15 years ago, when the whole idea was laughable. He's determined the whole business will be carbon neutral by 2020. Nigel Stansfield, senior director of product, design and innovation at InterfaceFlor's Halifax site, says that in the 1990s all InterfaceFlor was trying to do was keeping its products out of landfill. It knew all about making carpet tiles, but "we didn't have the technologies to recycle the product back into a carpet tile. So we needed to think of other things we could do with the product." With the Biffaward scheme, Calderdale council and the Green Business Network, InterfaceFlor set up its 'ReEntry' scheme for taking carpet tiles back from sites, cleaning and sorting them, then selling them on to charities. About a quarter of InterfaceFlor's raw materials are now recycled or bio-based. The face yarn goes to the pile-yarn suppliers, the bitumen backing straight into new backings. InterfaceFlor (pictured below left and overleaf) has to make hardwearing products that are stable and will last for seven to 10 years. Its customers won't compromise on quality, performance, comfort underfoot, aesthetics or appeal. That means continuing to use polyamide – nylon. Since the 1990s, InterfaceFlor has been increasing the proportion of 'post-industrial' nylon waste that goes into its feedstock. Now it's using post-consumer waste to reduce the virgin-material content even further. Stansfield agrees that the business model will eventually change from selling carpet tiles to selling a floor-covering service in long-term contracts that make sure the floor covering is always attractive and in good condition. If InterfaceFlor is to get its carpet tiles back for recycling, it helps to have a business model that keeps track of where the tiles are and what condition they're in. Gilbert sees the same driver. He says even soft drinks makers are looking at licensing the PET in their bottles so they can take them back for remanufacture. More and more businesses, he says, are starting to look at their designs: "That means they may also be looking at the cost of the material as well. At the end of life, is there a way we can recover the material?" There are two basic design-for-disposal considerations, says Gilbert: how you dismantle the product; and, once you've dismantled it, how you recover the component parts. He suggests manufacturers start by looking at the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of their existing products. Look at the mix of materials they use. Why are they using those materials? Are any of those likely to become more scarce or more abundant? Is any of that material likely to become more recoverable? And are there better processes they could use? The techniques we're seeing, says Gilbert, are to try to reduce the mix of materials, try to reduce the use of layered or composite materials, try to reduce the amount of 'fillers' used with polymers, which will degrade in recycling. Some metal finishes are also problematic. Jenni Rosser is head of the eco-design team at government agency Envirowise, which provides free environmental advice to industry, and a member of the BSI committee on eco-design. She says the extent to which manufacturers have embraced design for end-of-life techniques depends greatly on their size, whether they have offshored manufacturing, whether they use design agencies, and whether they buy in components and sub-assemblies rather than designing and making them themselves. She insists that companies have to break down any barriers that exist between designers, marketeers and production people – something that's hard to manage if design is in the UK and production is thousands of miles away in eastern Europe or beyond. Designers on day-to-day speaking terms with production managers tend to know how the products are manufactured and what the barriers are to including particular design features. Rosser's simple example is that tins of beans would be a lot cheaper to transport if they were square. Production, on the other hand, relies on the tins' ability to roll along gravity-fed lines before and after filling: "You get a better flowing production line rather than the designers coming up with a particular design and the production team trying to figure out how to produce it." You have to educate your designers in how the product is used at every stage until disposal. "If you think about a washing machine and a mobile phone," says Rosser, "without any great environmental impact analysis, common sense will tell you that the water use and energy use is going to set the biggest environmental impact of a washing machine over its lifecycle." It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time worrying about the energy consumed in the manufacture of a washing machine compared with how much energy or water it consumes in use. Similarly a mobile phone consumes hardly any energy in use, but it's a complex product that consumers probably change every 18 months. The biggest environmental impact is its disposal. Its manufacture uses a lot of plastics and rare metals. It should be designed to snap apart really easily so you can recycle the casing and recover most of the rest of it. She suggests manufacturers simply list the top three cradle-to-grave environmental impacts that product will have and persuade their designers to make a special effort to minimise them. The usual list of business drivers for doing this include qualifying as a supplier to companies keen to promote their eco-friendly supply chain credentials, compliance with regulation, and cost saving. Rosser's eco-design team last year identified over £50 million of savings through "quick wins" in product and packaging eco-design. She believes another driver is brand awareness, though the credit crunch has diluted its impact. It does help, she believes, to be able to tell customers their washing machine will cut your water charges, or energy bills, or both. She acknowledges that life does become a bit more complicated once you delve into the detail. The ambient-temperature washing machine may require a combination of machine and an ambient-temperature washing powder. A washing-machine maker might produce an ambient machine but not be able to launch it until the right powder becomes available. That's a matter of deep market research for a good design team. Envirowise has run a number of web events discussing all this which you and your design team can re-run from its website. Envirowise has also produced a packaging-design tool and is now working on a product-design tool to help manufacturers run through and evaluate alternative designs. Most companies are still at the beginning of the sustainable-product design journey. There are some big obstacles. How much new investment might it need? If you have invested heavily in traditional technology, how, with things the way they are with the banks, do you think about finding more to retool? Your people might be extremely (and expensively) skilled in an obsolete technology. And, in aerospace or other industries, you may have to face gaining compliance to different regulations or having your redesigned product recertified. But there's no turning back. Without eco-design and production, InterfaceFlor would be just another carpet tile maker. Today, it's far from that.