Nobody starts a hardware company with the express goal of destroying as much of the planet as they possibly can. Walking around the startup hall at CES, however, I noticed that — with a few notable exceptions — there was painfully little attention given to material choice, repairability, ease of disassembly and considerations around the end of usable life.
It’s embarrassing, really — but as someone who used to run a hardware startup, I know it can be hard to prioritize when you have limited time and resources. However, if you can’t make planet-friendly choices as the founder of a startup, when the buck literally stops with you, when can you?
In an effort to figure out how you can create greener hardware, we spoke with Lauryn Menard, a professor at the California College of the Arts, where she teaches the future of biodesign. She’s also an adviser to Women in Design SF and the co-founder and creative director at PROWL Studio, an Oakland, California-based design and material futures consultancy focusing on sustainable solutions.
“As a startup, you have choices. The thing is, it’s such a capitalistic society we live in, and a lot of decisions are made based on time and money,” Menard explained. The startups want to think about sustainability, but they are moving at breakneck speed and trying to get a product to market as soon as possible. “The startups need to hit their target price point and all that good stuff.”
But there are some big things moving out there in the market. Consumer demands are shifting, and climate pledges, circularity strategies and environmental questions are all bubbling to the surface. It’s hard to say whether enough customers are making purchasing decisions based on a company’s green credentials to move the needle meaningfully, but product development cycles can take years, and who knows what the landscape looks like by the time your product makes it to market? To some companies, it might make sense to take the risk, but other founders are starting to think differently about how products are made.
“If a startup is being run by solely engineers, that can be problematic: Engineers tend to be worried [about] making sure they’re getting to the finish line. They put all of their energy into making something function and are probably leaning toward materials, ways of making and manufacturing processes that they’re already familiar with,” Menard explained. “What we’ve seen [be] really helpful is working with a design studio that specializes in more sustainable ways of thinking and healthier materials. Or partnering with someone like a materials library, so they’ve already started thinking about the functionality of the materials by the time they are making a prototype. Just in the same way that it takes a really long time to get an MVP product that works and looks the way you want, it sometimes takes a long time to put a new material into an existing manufacturing process.”
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Thinking sustainability
One of the big challenges we have with creating more sustainable products is that we are often replacing plastics with something else. The problem is that plastics are deeply embedded in workflows already. Product designers love how predictable, easy to design and repeatable plastic is.
There also isn’t an obvious one-for-one replacement for plastic; depending on the use case and material properties you need, you may have to replace it with wool, paper, wood, plant pulp, carbon fiber, seaweed, hemp, mycelium, lab-grown leather or any number of other materials that are available.
Here’s what founders and product designers can do to think about sustainability and product development in a more conscious way.
“We are working on a hemp bioplastic project right now. The way that we’re going about it is we’re putting a new material inside of a conventional injection molding machine — but that’s not going to work perfectly the first time we try it,” Menard said. “Essentially, what I’m saying is that material R&D has to go hand-in-hand with functionality and engineering R&D.”
If you look closely at the products you use every day, you’ll recognize that they are fantastically complicated. We are used to headphones that can move in 10 different ways, that are sturdy and feel good against our bodies, that look good, are waterproof, can be dropped time and time again and don’t fade or discolor. And that’s before we even start looking at what’s going on inside: what the circuit board is made of, what the components and wiring are made of, etc.
“The sustainability revolution is a material problem,” Menard said, adding that one of the biggest end-of-life problems is materials that cannot be recycled together are bonded together, often with glue or tiny screws that cannot be easily and quickly disassembled.
Thinking monomaterial design
The biggest trend in sustainable design is so-called monomaterial design — creating a fully functional object using only one material. That’s helpful for educational purposes because companies don’t have to teach consumers how to dispose of or repair more than one material if the whole product can be recycled or composted. Similarly, if a product needs to be repaired, there’s a huge difference between replacing a part and sewing a bit of ripped fabric.
“Monomaterials is where the industrial design world is moving right now. Instead of using little screws, people are instead putting things together with ways to snap things closed, not unlike what you might have seen on clamshell food containers,” Menard said. “To do that, we have to retrain. Designers have done things the same way for a long time, and there is a little bit of growing pains and friction with all of these startups and studios.”
Even as startups select new materials, a lot of the new, more responsible materials aren’t ready to scale. To design engineers, the unknowns of the exact material properties might introduce new risks, and if you choose the wrong material, you may run into issues when you shift from manufacturing in the thousands to the millions.
The other challenge with monomaterials is comfort; for a product like a set of headphones, you need rigid parts to give the product its shape and soft parts that are comfortable against the body. Designers know that foam and fabric are comfortable. Plastic is rigid. Metal hardware can be removed and replaced and maybe repaired. If you’re trying to make the whole headphones from a single material, you have to think differently and prioritize, which is much more difficult.
“If you want to make a monomaterial headphone, and you wanted the buttons, the housing, the part that touches your head, to all be made from the same material, we’re going to have to find a way for the material to be comfortable and rigid and compostable or biodegradable and not too expensive to manufacture,” Menard pointed out. “That’s where monomaterial becomes a bit of a dream state rather than practical for things like personal technology. On the consumer electronics side, the hump we need to get over is that we need to build trust for these new form factors. I don’t really think we’ve even scratched the surface.”
So where do you start?
Product designers are often a bit ignorant of what’s even possible with modern materials, and continuing education will remain an important aspect of building the next generation of products. As a startup founder, however, you have the opportunity to drive that within your company by asking the right questions and hiring people who are mission-aligned with the company’s sustainability goals.
“If I were a startup founder, I would be looking for engineers who are extremely resourceful and willing to collaborate. A lot of engineers don’t want to do that — but they do exist! Start by asking who is an expert in the question you have. What are some resources that you can dip into? Or what are some other industries that are thinking sustainably? Can you adopt their thinking?
“More than likely, someone else has already worked on something similar, even if it’s on a really small niche scale. Keep in mind that material scientists exists for a reason, and they’re the people to talk to: They’re the ones who provide something that leads to manufacturing. So whether you’re talking to your factory or a material scientist about what’s possible with the materials, both are going to be helpful. Trying to teach yourself at your desk is not going to be helpful.”
The key is to start early in the product development cycle. Even as you’re starting with early minimum viable product prototypes, it’s important to add sustainability, materials choice and the overall goals of the company as constraints on the product. Of course, that means you also need to add that to the budget.
“When you are budgeting for sustainability development, you need to layer that in when you are speaking to your investors, too. It’s something you need to invest in. I’m sure you can get scrappy and just put out yet another product that functions well. It may not even have any competitors. But when people find out what it’s made of, that you have no plan for end of life, you’re kind of screwed,” Menard said. “In this new atmosphere, it’s really a matter of timing. And timing depends on industry. If you need to get FDA approval and it’s a consumable, you may be talking one to two years. You don’t have to adopt a new bioplastic, you can instead choose something that already exists: Not everything has to be made from a new freaking material!”
What people often forget is that sustainability doesn’t necessarily mean embracing exotic materials; we have many materials that can be used. Aluminum, for example, can be recycled many times. Manufacturing methods already exist — you’re just adopting new ways of using the material or applying it to new products, segments or industries.
Designing for end of life
Having a plan for a product’s end of life is more and more important, and a lot of companies are starting to figure out how to think about the circularity of their products.
“There are many ways of thinking about future-proofing your business. You can put systems in place to buy products back, or to repurpose, recycle or recirculate products that you have going into the field. Ultimately, it’s going to be more affordable in the future to reuse the products you’ve already put into the field [ … ] as raw materials,” Menard said. “We’re seeing a lot of huge corporations trying to shift and figure out what that looks like. It’s a new business model; you’re no longer just producing things and putting them into the world. I call the circular economy a raining cloud. Collect the rainwater and put it back into the loop, and it will benefit you in the future. That’s true both because your consumers are more likely to trust you because you are being smart and you have responsible business practices. You may also be getting ahead of legislation that is bound to come our way.”
And legislation is definitely coming. Although some researchers are worried that plastic-bag bans are backfiring, governments are taking action. From October this year, the U.K. is banning a large number of single-use plastics, for example. For now, the ban covers disposable single-use plastic plates, trays, bowls, cutlery and certain types of polystyrene cups and food containers, but it isn’t unthinkable that other types of single-use plastics, such as packaging materials, could be next.
For a lot of startups, the narrative is to worry about legislation and sustainability later and focus on getting the product to market as quickly as possible. The shift we are starting to see in some industries, however, is that sustainability and circularity are becoming table stakes rather than a luxury.
“The recession is a looming cloud, and I’ve seen some of our clients see it as a new lens to see the market through. If things are slowing down, they see it as an opportunity to rethink aspects of the business. If they are forced to slow down, they may as well take the time and resources to plan to change up the supply chain,” Menard suggested. “I guess the best way to think about it is that now’s a really good time to do that thinking about future-proofing your supply chain and product decisions.”
Goodbye virgin plastics
“If I could wave a magic wand and change something about our industry, I wish I could put all virgin plastic manufacturers out of business. The fact that they still exist, and that we are still seeing an increase in petroleum-based plastics, that researchers are saying we will continue to see an increase in petroleum-based plastics up until 2040, is awful,” Menard said. “I wish that they would just become illegal. We are now seeing that microplastics are in our bodies. They are all over our cells. It’s crazy: Plastics are the most prolific material in our world, and it’s causing so many issues that we don’t even understand yet. In the worlds of hardware design, engineering, plastic is the enemy, and we need to stop its production. In my dream world, I would be able to speed up testing and scaling of all of these new materials that are becoming available. But that’s exactly what we did with plastics, without knowing the unforeseen circumstances and then we ended up where we are now.”
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Another curious trend in the materials space is greenwashing: Everyone wants to be the first company to use a cool new material, but there’s a strange trend that nobody wants to be the second. If one car manufacturer comes up with an exciting new way of doing mycelium leather for car seats, the other car manufacturers don’t want to follow suit because Volvo already did that.
Personally, I don’t get why it isn’t the other way around: If one brand has already done all the materials testing and trusts it to put it in a car, then the material is effectively de-risked and available for that industry. If more manufacturers adopt it, demand goes up, the scale goes up and the price comes down.
“From our point of view, I think it’s a great idea to use the same material that’s already being used. You don’t have to go through all that R&D, take two years and spend millions of dollars. If you can use it in a new way that is brand aligned, then using a suitable material is where you innovate, not by being first,” Menard says with no small amount of exasperation in her voice. “We see it all the time. It’s kind of wild.”
Sustainability starts with company culture
Making products that are good, durable and long-lasting is another way to be sustainable.
“Do you know the company Shein? In the fashion world, people are doing Shein hauls, where they purchase a giant bag of things for like $100,” Menard said, referring to a Wardrobe Crisis podcast episode about the phenomenon.
The problem is that people are buying a load of clothes that are trendy but very poorly made and borderline disposable. “People are doing TikTok trends of Shein hauls, completely blind to what that means to the culture. At the same time, there’s this whole other culture that is shaming Shein, with people buying from companies like Pangaia, who have the contents of their clothing printed right on the chest. You are seeing both happen. In the beauty industry, you are seeing cruelty-free natural beauty, and then you see the Kardashians. In pop culture, there is this clash of movements that I have yet to make sense of. But the people who are the Pangaia-wearing types of folks, I do believe will purchase fewer things. They’ll be more conscious about what they’re purchasing, do so with intention, and they’ll be asking questions about shipping, the packaging and all that. But really, it’s the people doing the Shein hauls that we need to convert.”
Being present and mindful goes a long way. It can be simple as remembering your phone charger before you go on a trip so you don’t have to buy your 23rd USB charger at an airport. Or bringing a travel mug to your local coffee place so you don’t have to be part of yet another styrofoam or paper cup ending up in a landfill. These are all behavioral changes that people can make by making almost no effort.
“Convenience culture kills,” Menard sighed.” But the only way we are ever going to see a complete shift is the same way things have worked historically. There needs to be a [monetary] incentive for people.”
Incentives — whether that’s positive incentives in terms of discounts or negative incentives in terms of fines or taxes — do work, and a number of legal and financial incentives are being discussed at all levels of government.
For startups, then, designing products to be more likely to attract incentives in the future or comply with rules that haven’t been written yet is a guessing game. On the whole, it’s fair to assume that we are going to move toward more sustainable, more green, more durable, more biodegradable and more compostable.
Making choices to make that an option early in the life cycle of a company, so there’s a culture for sustainability from day zero, is a choice founders can make before they do anything else.
