Construction, textiles: how eco-design is transforming certain markets 

Green­house gas emis­sions need to be reduced by 40% as we approach 2030 to lim­it­ing glob­al warm­ing to less than 2 degrees. Hence, if we want to respect the 2015 Par­is Agree­ment, we must adopt new pro­duc­tion mod­els and think well upstream about the envir­on­ment­al per­form­ance of products and indus­tri­al or com­mer­cial pro­cesses. To do this, com­pan­ies are turn­ing to the prin­ciple of “eco-design”, which con­sists of integ­rat­ing as many envir­on­ment­al aspects and pro­cesses as pos­sible into products, well before they are put on the market. 

Ben­jamin Cabanes, a lec­turer and research­er in man­age­ment sci­ence at École des Mines de Par­is and École Poly­tech­nique (IP Par­is), defines eco-design as “a pre­vent­ive approach”. It con­sists of integ­rat­ing envir­on­ment­al aspects not only in the design phase, but also through­out the life cycle of a product. This is true from the extrac­tion of its raw mater­i­als, through its pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion, to its use, recyc­ling and end of life. 

“This approach is based on sev­er­al meth­od­o­lo­gies,” explains Ben­jamin Cabanes, “includ­ing Life Cycle Assess­ment (LCA), which is divided into four stages: object­ives of the LCA; invent­ory of incom­ing and out­go­ing mater­i­al and energy flows; iden­ti­fic­a­tion of poten­tial impacts; and finally, ana­lys­is and inter­pret­a­tion of the res­ults to pro­pose solu­tions for product design.”

If you want to make a T‑shirt, for example, you must con­sider the raw mater­i­als used: like how cot­ton is pro­duced, as it often requires a lot of water, pesti­cides, and fer­til­isers, which have very sig­ni­fic­ant envir­on­ment­al impacts. Then, the gar­ment will, of course, need to be pro­duced and often dis­trib­uted to the oth­er side of the plan­et: all steps that con­sume a lot of energy. Finally, we must con­sider how the T‑shirt will actu­ally be used. It will need to be washed more or less often depend­ing on the mater­i­al or col­our and these suc­cess­ive wash­ings will have an impact on the envir­on­ment, as they require water and energy used in the wash­ing machine.

In order to remain com­pet­it­ive, it is in the interest of com­pan­ies to anti­cip­ate reg­u­la­tions that will be increas­ingly restrict­ive, such as those induced in France by the “Anti-waste for a cir­cu­lar eco­nomy” (AGEC) law. How­ever, this LCA approach is far from being wide­spread, as the ten­sion between envir­on­ment­al and eco­nom­ic per­form­ance remains too great. 

“It is not enough to pro­duce organ­ic T‑shirts to be an eco-respons­ible com­pany,” says Ben­jamin Cabanes. “If, as a com­pany, you release ten new col­lec­tions a year and have sev­er­al sale peri­ods to sell off old stock, you are encour­aging con­sump­tion without meet­ing real needs.”

It takes more than a line of organ­ic­ally-pro­duced T‑shirts to be an eco-respons­ible company.

To avoid gre­en­wash­ing, it is there­fore essen­tial to con­sider the entire pro­duc­tion pro­cess, and to gen­er­al­ise the LCA approach through­out the com­pany, apply­ing it to all products not just a few. But how can com­pan­ies be con­vinced? Ben­jamin Cabanes is bank­ing on the train­ing of young people in these meth­ods and issues and counts on the motiv­a­tion of young engin­eers who are already choos­ing to go into a par­tic­u­lar sec­tor of activ­ity or com­pany that are more aligned with their own envir­on­ment­al commitments.

In the build­ing and pub­lic works (BTP) sec­tor, the eco-design approach, framed by increas­ingly rig­or­ous reg­u­la­tions, is already hav­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant impact. For example, the use of new types of mater­i­als and new con­struc­tion pro­cesses makes it pos­sible to reduce energy loss in exist­ing build­ings and to ren­ov­ate old build­ings with a view to redu­cing their car­bon foot­print. The con­struc­tion industry has much poten­tial for recyc­ling its own waste, but also for using cur­rent waste. This is how the founders of the fam­ily-run start-up Néo­lithe came up with the idea of fos­sil­ising com­mon waste to trans­form it into min­er­al aggreg­ates that can be reused in con­struc­tion and pub­lic works. 

Today, most of the non-recyc­lable waste pro­duced by indi­vidu­als (house­hold waste) or by com­pan­ies (ordin­ary indus­tri­al waste) is bur­ied in huge land­fills or incin­er­ated, which in both cases leads to sig­ni­fic­ant pol­lu­tion. In the first case, there is ser­i­ous soil pol­lu­tion and meth­ane emis­sions dur­ing the decom­pos­i­tion of the waste; in the second case, the mater­i­al dis­ap­pears in smoke, but the energy pro­duced by the incin­er­at­or to burn it is highly carbonated. 

“The waste fos­sil­isa­tion pro­cess was inven­ted by my fath­er Wil­li­am Cru­aud, a stone mason,” explains Nic­olas Cru­aud, pres­id­ent of Néo­lithe. “For 40 years he has been work­ing on the white lime­stone of the Loire castles. What is known as ‘tuffeau’ is noth­ing more than the remains of Creta­ceous waste, which has been fos­sil­ised and sed­i­men­ted. His idea was to rep­lic­ate this nat­ur­al pro­cess by accel­er­at­ing it, through a mech­an­ic­al and chem­ic­al trans­form­a­tion without heat­ing that min­er­al­ises the mater­i­al and does not emit CO₂.”

The son, a poly­tech­ni­cian, imple­men­ted his father­’s idea, and they cre­ated this indus­tri­al start-up in Angers in 2019, in asso­ci­ation with engin­eer Clé­ment Bénassy.

The prin­ciple is to grind the waste into a very fine flour (between 0 and 500 microns) and then to react this flour with min­er­al bind­ers, which are the indus­tri­al secret of Neo­lithe. This reac­tion pro­duces a min­er­al paste that is shaped under pres­sure in a “fos­sil­iser” to pro­duce small aggreg­ates. “We call this aggreg­ate ‘Anthro­po­cite’ in ref­er­ence to the Anthro­po­cene era, the geo­lo­gic­al peri­od when humans began to have a real influ­ence on the Earth.”

This min­er­al aggreg­ate can be used in cer­tain types of con­crete and is in the pro­cess of being approved for use in road sub-base mater­i­als. “If we fos­sil­ised the 30 mil­lion tonnes of French waste per year, we would obtain 40 mil­lion tonnes of aggreg­ates and reduce the French car­bon foot­print by a factor of ten,” says Nic­olas Cru­aud. Because this pro­cess also has the advant­age of being ‘car­bon neg­at­ive’, since it allows for car­bon sequestration. 

The com­pany plans to deploy 250 fos­sil­isers through­out the coun­try by 2027, each of these machines being able to pro­cess 10,000 tonnes of waste per year and pro­duce 12,000 tonnes of aggreg­ates. The com­pany will then gen­er­ate rev­en­ue both from the quant­it­ies of aggreg­ate sold and from its waste treat­ment ser­vices, as the accel­er­ated fos­sil­isa­tion pro­cess is fin­an­cially and envir­on­ment­ally com­pet­it­ive with land­fill or incineration. 

Many coun­tries, espe­cially those with strong reg­u­lat­ory con­straints on land­fill and incin­er­a­tion, are begin­ning to show interest in this new process. 

Marina Julienne