Why Companies Can't Design Sustainable, Eco-Friendly Products

0:00 Intro
0:45 The Industrial Revolution
2:16 The Allure of Scale
2:54 Move Fast and Break Things
5:16 Why A Holistic System Is SO Important
7:26 Materials and Sourcing
8:13 Sustainability is HARD To Measure
10:32 Plastic is Kind of Amazing
11:36 Mismatched Incentives
11:46 Customers At Fault
12:56 Convenience Is King
14:11 The Path of Least Resistance
14:56 Designers/Engineers Are At Fault
17:36 Companies Are At Fault
18:36 Lawmakers Are At Fault
20:00 Are We Doomed?

All content written by John Mauriello. Edited by Bradley Heath and John Mauriello. John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is an Adjunct Professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts.

Credits/Sources:

Sustainable Design and Eco Friendly Industrial Design is very important. Circular Economy Product Design is key to a sustainable future. Complex Supply Chain Issues, Bioplastics, and Carbon Negative Materials all play a part.

[Nighthawkinlight]

The biggest recycling hurdle I know of that could be solved with minimal inconvenience is shipping labels. Hurray Amazon for their 100% recyclable packaging...until they stick the impossible to remove non recyclable shipping label in place. It's the same for many companies. Cardboard is one of very few easily recycled materials and we ruin that option with a non recyclable, non removable sticker.

[olleh]

If glass bottles were standardized they could be cleaned rather than crushed and reformed. I am sure standardization of commonly used parts can be an important factor in increasing recyclability in many other products as well.

[ChlCnCarnag]

Apple: We're trying to be good for the environment. That's why we make our devices next to impossible to repair outside of our own specialized tools we don't sell to anyone we don't want repairing them; have absurd amount of waste packaging with our products; and create our products to be as fragile as possible so that when they inevitably break you're forced to buy a new one and dispose of the old one which ends up in a landfill because many of the components cannot be recycled in their current state, and converting them to a renewable state would cost too much.

[Robin_Goodfellow]

I'm suddenly reminded of a woman our family always just called "the Zipper Lady." She ran a little shop somewhere on the south side of town, and whenever a zipper broke on one of our jackets, Mom would take it to the Zipper Lady and she would fix it. I don't know what the viability of clothing repair as a small business is, but I can't help but think that we would have thrown out many bulky jackets and winter coats if not for this little old woman who was willing to fix them for a reasonable price.

[QuixEnd]

Our mindset could definitely change in just a generation or two and I think it will some day. It drives me insane how disposable everything is, even if you WANT to avoid it you just cant

[_chpset]

A lot of people have no idea the true scale of waste being created in industrial manufacturing and raw material extraction. The single best thing that could be done to initiate a change in sustainability practices is to penalize corporations for producing waste. The problem doesn't just occur in fossil fuels, it permeates the entire system.

[kuratse]

So, a year or so ago Nestlé decided to make the straws for Milo paper.

They had turned it completely into a paper straw, which was an effort to greenwash the company. Though it had many downsides and side effects. Such as the straw completely dissolving into the drink making it impossible to drink without the straw falling apart, the wood pulp making the drink feel pulpy and have paper inside your milo, the straw was utterly trash at poking through the seal to open the drink, which then made the straw end bend and unable to let liquid through, and the straw would start deteriorate once you start drinking which forces a time limit before you become sad.

Then a few months after that, they swapped the wood pulp paper straw, out for a better "paper" straw. This time, it solved the issue of the straw completely dissolving into the drink and the issue of the straw bending and failing completely. Though this iteration caused even more problems, like for example, since the straw was too thick, less liquid is able to pass through and the seal for the packet sometimes breaks out like a hole puncher punching paper which gave you the surprise of a high chance to swallow the plastic seal.

Remember how I stated "paper" in quotation marks? Yes, it is not paper. It is a plastic straw with a paper straw covering it, which completely defeats the purpose it had in the very first place. Literally made it worse in every possible way.

Edit: I just realised that they recently fixed the straws. They no longer have any plastic, and are as durable as the plastic straws. It might be that the changes to the straws were made due to pressure from the public, and that induced incredible haste to change it regardless of the quality. Though now it seems that they have fixed the issues, and the fully paper straws are here. They are surprisingly sturdy and have no sign of any plastic. I highly recommend trying the drink out at least once.

[MsRinda]

I run an Etsy store and have tried somewhat desperately to get my packaging to be easily recyclable. I know customers won't separate the plastic and paper parts of bubble mailers, so I switched to padded cardboard mailers.

The address labels are where the real fun begins. Label printers use thermal paper, which normally can't be recycled. There is ecoenclose (great company!), but they're American, and shipping a roll of labels over to Europe costs 70usd and adds carbon emissions. Then there's noissue, which have labels that are compostable, which isn't the same as recyclable, so I'm not even sure I can use them. The best part: they added text stating how friendly the labels are to the edge of the labels, which means the printable area is now too small for me to even use them in the first place! 🤡

I also looked for recyclable stickers to close the mailers with, and that's where I truly lost my mind. I've reached out to so many businesses to ask if their "eco-friendly" stickers are recyclable. No one knows. No one can tell me if their stickers are OK to throw into paper recycling, and they most of them don't care to find out. One company was sure theirs were, and included the details of the material they used. When I checked the website of the manufacturer, it was a different, very specific product of theirs that was recyclable. The stickers I got told were 100% OK to recycle... 100% weren't.

It is so hard to *actually* be sustainable. I'm really trying to do what I can but it is so disheartening, seeing how hard it is to do the right thing.

[jeromewesselman]

Right to repair has a long way to go. It's another great example of corporate kicking, screaming, and foot-dragging. Louis Rossman has been leading the charge against Apple in particular

[djcwittz]

I really like this. He doesn't just say "oh we need to go all electrical!" and leave it at that, he actually talks about how this issue is pretty complicated and what direction we need to head

[NeverNatter]

So I actually am a material scientist and this is probably the best video I've seen on this whole matter. Pretty much all of them are incredibly one-sided. And I appreciate you looked at it all from different directions. Because things are complicated. A sustainable material isn't everything. Thank you for the video!

[CarrieMK]

SquareSpace does require physical resources, in the form of servers, electricity, cooling, maintenance, back-up tapes, etc. Just because you don’t see it or think about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

[krishacz]

that mexico city example brings to mind a though i had about sustainability: Negative incentives don't work. When you ban something, people will find a workaround and cheese the system. Positive incentives are much better, making public transport better, cheaper and more convenient.
If we wanted to get rid of single use plastic packaging, the way to go would not be to introduce a tax on it, but instead create a tax benefit for those companies who use sustainable packaging.

[CampingforCool]

It seems that the idea of infinite growth is the primary problem that needs to change. As long as companies are incentivized by infinite growth nothing gets better.

[ChrischiTutorialLPs]

I just wanna point something out here: While i totally agree with your point about bottling water, when it comes to sustainability, cargo ships are the wrong place to start. Even though their engines produce a LOT of CO2, the sheer volume of material they can ship is so ridiculous, the amount of CO2 per container is the tiniest part of the CO2 footprint of any given product.

[zakuro]

a family member of mine has been growing a skincare company for a good few years now. last time i visited, they said something that i found really depressing - that when the company started struggling a while ago, it was because they got too comfortable; they had the company at a size that worked for them and thus stopped growing it. then they realised their competitors were outgrowing them, putting them in the red. this sentiment, coming from a relative, made me realise how absolutely imperative it is to any business under our economic system to strive for infinite growth

[Space_Garbage]

The best thing a consumer can do is buy less in general. Try to only buy things you really need and try to purchase things of higher quality so you can use it longer. Think of everything you buy as something going into a landfill at some point.

Another action to take is to avoid peer pressuring/judging people who use older electronic devices, clothes, vehicles, or even houses. Companies already spend billions trying to convince you to buy the next best thing. Why work for them for free?

[skyekehoe]

I think another reason the Patagonia repair program doesn't get used that much is because Patagonia makes really high quality products. They don't break easily and when they do come to the end of their lifespans it's been 10-15 years

[bigbubba]

Great video! I think that also the whole "environmentally friendly" thing has moved away from "we want to help our planet" to "virtue signal to get points with people, " since (as you mentioned), a lot of companies are doing seemingly environmentally friendly things, but they are actually worse for the environment

[YanniCooper]

While you don't explicitly state it, you do kind of imply that we can solve this by personal action. Unfortunately the vast majority of this issue is corporate in scale, and even if every individual who has watched this video switched to 100% sustainable processes it would barely make a dent in the amount of damage almost any large company does. Yes we should become better informed, and it certainly is worthwhile to practice more sustainable living on a personal scale, but really the changes that need to be made are on the corporate and governmental scales, and unless we can achieve that, no amount of reuse and recycling will really actually matter.