Sophie Thomas OBE, Founding Partner at etsaW Ventures, gives an inside look at an innovative pilot programme aiming to connect the design and waste management sectors and increase circularity.
On a crisp day in March, a group of designers sit around a table in the Brighton Waste House staring at a pile of broken and unwanted electronics. This was the first outing for the Design Skills for Embedding Circularity programme design cohort.
This pilot programme, backed by CIWM, CEI, Design Council, WRAP and Urge Collective, is a direct response to the call set out by Tim Walker in his presidential report back in 2024 when he asked: ‘Is waste a failure of design?’.
The report recommended:
- increased communication and learning between the Design and Waste Management sectors;
- identifying key sector responsibilities, including the upskilling of designers to increase knowledge and credibility;
- the creation and sharing of third-party verified resources;
- the creation of feedback loops through the waste management sector into brands/manufacturers/designers on key problematic items;
- and the highlighting of the economic impact of waste disposal on the public sector.
So, we have embarked on an investigative pilot to explore effective ways to foster good communication between the sectors. A cohort of 15 practising industrial designers was selected from applicants who responded to our call for UK participants.
Using the focus areas set out by the Circular Economy Task Force, it focused on hot topics like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and reuse and mixed waste streams, and the final cohort selected worked in furniture, electronics, mobility, and packaging.
The programme has been developed by Alexie Sommer from Urge Collective and myself to run through two main phases and an output presentation, building on design residency methodologies from The Great Recovery programme that ran between 2012-2016 and Urge’s facilitation expertise.
The first is immersion (what we call ‘seeing is believing’), with three months of facility visits and expert webinars. The second is response, a 6-week design sprint that allows for deeper research dives into some of the challenges observed, encouraging collaboration across the sectors.
Insights from both phases will be fed back into the industries and government, discussing the outcomes, showing case studies, and demonstrating best practice for moving forward and scaling up.
Doing electronic teardowns with CIWM President David Greenfield and his team from Tech TakeBack was just the beginning. Since then, the team have travelled across the UK visiting major waste recovery facilities, speciality recyclers, paper mills, and manufacturing businesses.
Among the facilities that opened up their doors and gave us access to their teams were DS Smith, Sherbourne Recycling, Decathlon, Biffa, Enfinium, and SUEZ.
But what difference does it really make to watch a trommel toss out paper from glass, or see a robot pick the flexible plastics off a belt? Does experiencing the impact of an MRF fire started by a vape device, or getting the low down on which plastic type is not economically worth sorting, change the way we design our products?
My answer is that it should do. As an industry, we forget that most people don’t see how waste is handled and know how value is recovered from bags of recycling.
Designers are also not taught seriously about end-of-life and are not encouraged to consider it when designing. They are often told that they hold no influence, and when they do want to know more, they don’t know where to source good data.
There is a huge reliance on information put out by material suppliers when specifying for new products and packaging, which could be described as so generic it’s closer to greenwashing.
Many of the products that the programme cohort design would (or should) not end up in a household’s municipal recycling. So where do they go? It was only quite far into the programme when we realised we had not yet seen the answer to this question.
Small electrical products would hopefully end up in a WEEE bin, located in specific shops, streets or HWRCs. That is if you can find one. The WEEE bin locator was often found to be incorrect or out of date, sending people on wild goose chases to find them.
What about the products that don’t include electronics? Household products (cookware, cups and plates, toys, furniture, etc) are less visible in our end-of-life system. If they are lucky, they would end up getting re-routed back into the system whilst going through a reuse hub like the one run by Suez in Manchester.
If they didn’t have vintage or resale value, they would end up at the HWRCs in the unrecyclable or black bin skips, or confusion may see them thrown into a recycling bin. It was a shock to the group to find out that a big chunk of the things they design may well end up in the incineration pile.
The resource and waste industry is in continual reaction mode to legislation shifts, economic market impacts, and the continual influx of new products, where they have no direct input or opportunity to help reduce end-of-life impact.
Packaging and products are evolving all the time and will often have big R&D budgets with briefs that emphasise better ergonomics, more efficient material usage, and customer satisfaction. Why is the waste management sector not included in this process?
The programme has been interspersed with expert conversations, covering topical subjects of simpler recycling, standards and regulations, technology advances and limitations, fluidity and economics of secondary material markets, and design potential in recycling and circularity.
This level of access for designers has arguably not happened since The Great Recovery, but we can see that it is still very much needed if we do want to shift towards more circularity in our systems.
We spent days deep in household waste streams at several different MRFs across the country, understanding the UK nuances in our infrastructure and collection systems.
Seeing it in action with your own eyes and hearing from those on the ground is completely different to reading about the process. It’s not only eye-opening, but there is a huge amount of myth-busting happening along the way.
Many more designers are now considering substituting plastics for ‘recyclable’ materials or bio-alternatives, but the arguments for or against are still very fluid. If designers do consider using ‘recyclable’ materials in their design, they believe it will be recycled, but our visits showed that this is not always the case.
A biodegradable material on a product will not go through anaerobic digestion (AD) if there is no provision for it to do so (we also may not have the correct conditions in the UK for it to break down). It’s very probable that wherever the product gets thrown away, it will eventually go to incineration.
The programme is now moving into the next phase, and the designers are ready to start tackling the big challenges they observed through the design sprint. Their site visit observations, information gathered, and connections made will inform the enquiries the designers will tackle during the sprint.
In parallel, partners Biffa and Decathlon have set sprint challenges. These range from:
- designing approaches that prevent vapes from entering household waste and recycling streams;
- demonstrator concepts that enable easier disassembly and recovery of high-value components from small electronics, especially lithium batteries;
- how to design out festival tent waste;
- and how to design a practical and scalable reusable packaging system for buy-back/resale programmes.
Interest in the Design Skills for Embedding Circularity programme has come from across the UK, Europe and from as far afield as Australia. There is a huge demand for this type of hands-on, immersive professional development from both sectors. Insights from the programme will be shared during an exhibition and symposium in the autumn.
The programme has been designed as an immersion into the challenges around investigating how we can build closer relationships, communications and systems with the design and waste sectors to make a circular economy really start to work.
More about the programme, visits and expert speakers can be found here.
