“Eco-design should be favoured over recycling”

Train­ers or polo shirts made from recycled plastic bottles; waste burnt to heat an entire neigh­bour­hood; bicycles designed from cof­fee cap­sules from which the alu­mini­um has been recovered… All these pro­jects, con­ceived with­in the frame­work of a “cir­cu­lar eco­nomy”, are sup­posed to allow the pro­duc­tion of new wealth by tak­ing less (exhaust­ible) resources from the plan­et. “How­ever, this type of recyc­ling has almost no effect on redu­cing the green­house gas emis­sions respons­ible for cli­mate change,” explains Lucie Domin­go, a lec­turer at the UniLaS­alle engin­eer­ing school in Rennes. 

“The risk in focus­ing on the waste crisis and the deple­tion of min­er­al and fossil resources is to reduce the com­plex­ity of human sys­tems to their pro­duc­tion and dis­pos­al, without ques­tion­ing the use of products, their main­ten­ance, their trans­port, or their use­ful­ness to soci­ety and the indi­vidu­als who make them up,” she says. “By ima­gin­ing numer­ous sys­tems to recycle waste, or by design­ing new products that allow it to be re-used, we for­get to ques­tion the very exist­ence of this waste. By giv­ing waste a mar­ket value, we devel­op tech­no­lo­gies that often con­sume a lot of energy or pro­duce emis­sions that are harm­ful to health and the environment.”

An emblem­at­ic example is the Copen­ha­gen incin­er­at­or, which came into ser­vice in 2017. It was sup­posed to be the largest and most effi­cient in the coun­try. With more than 50% of its house­hold waste burned to pro­duce energy and heat, Den­mark is the European coun­try that incin­er­ates the most waste. To the point of run­ning out! Over the past five years, the coun­try has increased its waste imports from the UK six­fold, partly to ensure the smooth run­ning of the new incin­er­at­or. For dec­ades, the UK has been pay­ing Den­mark, the Neth­er­lands, Ger­many, and Sweden to dis­pose of its waste, a cheap­er solu­tion than imple­ment­ing real waste man­age­ment policies. As for the Danes, they are less and less encour­aged to lim­it their waste, since the coun­try is short of it!

Sim­il­arly for plastic, the logist­ics of trans­port­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing polo shirts or shoes from recycled plastic can be more envir­on­ment­ally dam­aging than burn­ing these plastics loc­ally.  And the real chal­lenge is to recov­er plastic waste from the oceans, not from the land. The same prin­ciple is at work with the anti-waste food app To good to go, which is vir­tu­ous in itself, as it allows indi­vidu­als to give away per­ish­able products that could end up in the bin. But the down­side is that super­mar­kets are no longer care­ful to order only the quant­it­ies of food that are strictly neces­sary. “This is what we call the ‘lock-in’ effect,” explains Lucie Domin­go. “Indi­vidu­als or com­pan­ies are blocked with solu­tions that are attract­ive in the short-term, but which have very little impact. This can be seen at the European level, as resource con­sump­tion is still not decreasing.”

Europe has developed indic­at­ors to meas­ure domest­ic mater­i­al con­sump­tion (DMC) at the level of each coun­try, by aggreg­at­ing domest­ic extrac­tion and imports, minus exports. “Mater­i­al pro­ductiv­ity”, a ratio of gross domest­ic product (GDP) to mater­i­al con­sump­tion, is used to meas­ure soci­ety’s trans­ition to a more resource-effi­cient organ­isa­tion and to high­light the decoup­ling of eco­nom­ic growth from mater­i­al con­sump­tion. Over the past 10 years, domest­ic mater­i­al con­sump­tion in European coun­tries has aver­aged around 13 tonnes per cap­ita, with a high degree of vari­ab­il­ity between coun­tries, but without any sig­ni­fic­ant over­all decline.

For the past 10 years, the domest­ic con­sump­tion of mater­i­als in European coun­tries has aver­aged around 13 tonnes per capita.

“We can see that few resources can be cir­cu­lar, i.e. com­pletely rein­tro­duced into the pro­duc­tion of new products,” con­tin­ues Lucie Domin­go. “More than 50% of our resources are used for food or energy, and there­fore dis­ap­pear forever; anoth­er sig­ni­fic­ant part (45%) goes to the con­struc­tion sec­tor, which mobil­ises a huge quant­ity of mater­i­als over the long term: if the con­struc­tion of build­ings and infra­struc­tures is well done, these mater­i­als will not be touched for decades!”

What are the solu­tions to lim­it our con­sump­tion of resources and energy? Lucie Domin­go works on eco-design: by integ­rat­ing the life cycle of a good into its devel­op­ment pro­cess, eco-design makes it pos­sible to improve the envir­on­ment­al per­form­ance of this future product. The approach is com­plex and requires us to con­sider the beha­viour of indi­vidu­als and the influ­ence of the con­text on the life cycle of the product.

For her thes­is on a “Use-ori­ented eco-design meth­od­o­logy¹”, the research­er stud­ied refri­ger­at­ors. Their man­u­fac­ture has been stand­ard­ised at inter­na­tion­al level, where­as the use made of them depends on the eat­ing habits of indi­vidu­als and the cli­mate of the coun­tries where they are installed. House­holds that prefer ready meals will need a fridge that main­tains low tem­per­at­ures, below 5 degrees. Those who eat mostly fresh food will be sat­is­fied with a fridge that keeps food at between 5 and 15 degrees Celsi­us. And if fridges were ren­ted instead of sold, it would be pos­sible to change them accord­ing to one’s uses, which vary over the course of one’s life, the com­pos­i­tion of one’s house­hold, with or without young chil­dren or eld­erly people…

Is it unreal­ist­ic to integ­rate all these factors into the man­u­fac­ture of new refri­ger­at­ors? This case study shows firstly how import­ant it is to think about the use of our products. Secondly, what may seem unreal­ist­ic today may turn out to be per­fectly feas­ible tomor­row. “For example, it was thought for a long time that bulk sales would nev­er appeal to con­sumers,” says the lec­turer. “And indeed, mar­ket stud­ies indic­ated that people would not want to take or would not think of tak­ing a con­tain­er every time they went shop­ping, that it would be too dif­fi­cult for super­mar­kets to man­age, etc. How­ever, this type of sale has become widely accep­ted, with a bene­fit for the envir­on­ment (less pack­aging) and an import­ant eco­nom­ic bene­fit, espe­cially for the poorest house­holds, who can thus more eas­ily buy what they need on a daily basis. As for the super­mar­kets, they have had to adapt to meet the demand…”.

In the realm of the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy, all options must be con­sidered! And some examples of energy-effi­cient products are com­ing onto the mar­ket. For example, accord­ing to vari­ous European reg­u­la­tions, elec­tric hoovers must now meet eco-design require­ments that cov­er energy con­sump­tion dur­ing use, dust remov­al rate, dust emis­sions, noise, and dur­ab­il­ity. “It is import­ant to ration­al­ise the energy con­sump­tion of hoovers by using exist­ing non-pro­pri­et­ary tech­no­lo­gies that are cost-effect­ive and can reduce the cumu­lat­ive costs of pur­chas­ing and oper­at­ing these products,” the reg­u­la­tion states. A major European house­hold appli­ance group has reduced the aver­age energy con­sump­tion of its can­is­ter hoovers by a factor of three over 10 years (2010–2020), without com­prom­ising on effi­ciency or noise levels. But this trans­form­a­tion was thought out well in advance, and required sev­er­al years of test­ing and development…

Marina Julienne