What are the characteristics of products that respect nature? Reuse and recycling, renewable energy and emissions reduction are just some of the keywords of sustainable design.
The subject has for some years now been at the centre of international debate among theorists in the world of design and within universities, in industrial design faculties. The answers are complex, but some general principles have been established and today underpin the design and production of quality everyday products: the use of reusable, biodegradable, recyclable, non-toxic materials, designed with the long life of the product in mind, making it disassemblable, repairable, durable.
To talk about sustainable design, however, it is not enough to look at the product alone — everything beyond it and around it must be considered: the production process, the impact of production on the environment, and the credibility and reliability of the company. "Sustainable design," write Paolo Tamborrini, professor of architecture and design at the Politecnico di Turin, and journalist Giorgio Tartaro, "bases the design of new products — the result of the best compromise between environmental and techno-economic parameters — on the assessment of environmental impacts and on the choice of materials, forms and structures."
Reduction, reuse and recycling, assembly-disassembly-self-construction, use of clean and renewable energy, reduction of harmful emissions, choice of materials, analysis, certification and dematerialisation of the product-service. These are some of the keywords that design must meet in order to be defined as sustainable. Verifying compliance with all sustainability criteria requires complex assessments that are difficult to translate into regulation, but which in the long term should lead, as the Associazione per il disegno industriale (ADI) hopes, to a kind of quality certificate — a "guarantee stamp" that ensures compliance with sustainability parameters, protecting consumer choices.
Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? Why not take nature itself as a model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful, but rather something solid, beautiful and highly effective. Products can be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new — either as "biological nutrients" to be safely reintroduced into the environment, or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being downcycled into lower-grade uses as most recyclable materials are today.
Waste equals food is the first principle put forward in 2002 by the manifesto-book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things — literally, from cradle to cradle: rethinking the way we make things — by Michael Braungart, a German chemist, and William McDonough, an American architect. The vision is one of a continuous cycle of use and reuse of materials without the production of waste.
The authors argue, in fact, that the environmentalists' motto "reduce, reuse, recycle" — in other words, do more with less in order to minimise harm — is an approach that perpetuates in a one-way direction the "cradle to grave" production model dating back to the industrial revolution. That is, a production model in which more than 90 per cent of the materials industry uses subsequently become waste, much of it toxic.
Designing according to Cradle to Cradle principles therefore means introducing product life cycles that are essentially waste-free because they are inspired by natural systems — products that can be recycled indefinitely or that can return to nature because they are one hundred per cent biodegradable. It is a compelling principle that the most innovative contemporary designers have embraced, and one that guides their design philosophy for everyday products.