Producers of garbage

Posted in Manufacturing , on Thursday, October 02

We won't sweep it under the carpet. When you produce things, you produce waste. Victor Papanek's ghost is unavoidable, always whispering " In an environment that is screwed up visually, physically and chemically, the best and simplest thing that architects, industrial designers, planners etc. could do for humanity would be to stop working entirely ”. It's not the prettiest topic, probably why it's seldom brought up by manufacturers. We won't debate the ethics around manufacturing products at all, and anyway, our stance is kinda made. Still, we feel somewhat obligated to briefly touch upon the implications.

Ok, so manufacturing a product is most likely not positive for the environment. To take one example, our aluminum components; extracted from some mine (probably in China), smelted into rods, milled away to 20% of its volume, electrocuted in salty-chemical water, and then flew around the globe. You get the picture, it stings, doesn't feel good... However, the production of both standardized and custom components are opaque, also for us as sourcers. It's a complicated picture with a myriad of parts and energy consuming processes, making it difficult to measure even a proximate effect on the environment.

One of the sources of waste in this chain of events is packaging. Not that it's any easier to measure its actual footprint than anything else, but at least, a lot of it sits there in our plain sight. Obviously, there's the little cardboard box our product is presented in, plus, the PE padded envelope it arrives in. But this is just on the consumer end. Every single one of our components comes is some form of tray, often wrapped in plastic, padded with plastic or paper, and then put in a cardboard box.

The image above shows just a portion of all the packaging we received from our distributors and manufacturers (who probably also got their (raw?) materials in some other pieces of packaging). Our production case might be special, we don't really know how this is normally done and organized. Our assembly was in Norway, so we got parts sent in from all over the world; France, the UK, Spain, the US, and China. Sounds cool, but most likely highly inefficient. Especially since protective packaging feels soooo unnecessary.
Although, avoiding protective packaging seems hard; you basically need to have all the components coming from the same factory. In our experience, national proximity isn't even enough. For instance, the circuit boards we made at Hapro were heavily padded – and that's just an hour drive away from Oslo, shipped with the company's own courier.

There's no great conclusion to this rambling. Basically, what we're trying to say is that what we end up with as a consumer, is just the tip of the iceberg, we're at the tiny end of a fractal pattern; we get the small cherry on top of the larger energy cake. And it's a cake with obscured edges and ingredients. No, that's not exciting. Remember, the cake tastes like garbage.

du-du-DUUUU

Papanek quote from his book " Design in the Real World "

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