This week in If Products Could Speak… we looked at Life Cycle Assessment as a tool for considering the impact of products. After spending some time digging through web sites and article databases, I found an LCA for a wind turbine. I was surprised by how readable the article was, although I don’t have a background in this subject area. Looking at the breakdown of the impact of all the major parts of the turbine made LCA seem like a very manageable way of looking at issues of sustainability, although I was a little disappointed to see that there was no investigation of the turbine’s effect on it’s local ecosystem (other than land use) once it’s in place.

Reading this article and discussing other LCAs in class (LCAs for hamburgers, jeans, salmon, cell phones…) spurred my interest in how this kind of research is actually compiled and how doable it is for small businesses that want to be mindful of their products’ impacts. My interest in the subject was strong enough that it wound up leaking over into an assignment for Design Expo.

For our assignment this week in Design Expo, Nancy asked our teams to develop three products for three populations. Madeline, Bruno, Bryan, and I spent several hours brainstorming and researching to come up with three products we could actually articulate within a 12-minute presentation. In the process, we had to leave a few ideas behind, some of which were very interesting to me.

One concept that we just didn’t have time to flesh out was an attempt to enable businesses to collaborate with other businesses in order to reduce waste. Right now there are several companies that are designing their products to be easily recycled into new products (e.g. Patagonia’s Common Threads garment recycling program). But what about companies whose products’ parts could be broken down into materials to be shared by other companies? Is there a reciprocal way to design products so that they can transform for use by other businesses at the end of their first life? Is there a way to get businesses to collaborate on second or third uses for their products? The other day in If Products Could Speak… we started talking about the small ways that consumers reduce waste by reusing objects (e.g. a toothbrush becomes a grout cleaner, a tshirt becomes a dust rag, egg cartons become seed trays)– Is there a way to help businesses do this on a larger scale?