Every product and service we use has a carbon cost. That can seem a bit abstract and hard to visualise, so here’s an example: a new laptop has a carbon impact of 175 kg CO2 equivalent – the same as a car trip between Aberdeen and London. If you buy a second hand laptop instead of a new one, you make carbon savings of 74%.
A circular economy is when we share, rent, repair, reuse and recycle things to make them last as long as possible. This reduces consumption of our planet’s resources.¹
Zero Waste Scotland is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to inform policy and motivate people and businesses to support a circular economy. They gave us a brief to deliver a workshop with members of the public to discover and develop practical solutions to make things last.
We facilitated a four-hour idea generation session with 13 people in Glasgow. The workshop was open to anyone. It was important to get a really broad range of participants to ensure we weren’t just ‘preaching to the choir.’
The goals were to:
12 out of 13 participants had heard of the circular economy before the workshop.
At the beginning of the workshop, only 1 person felt very knowledgeable about the circular economy. Seven felt somewhat knowledgeable and five felt they had very little knowledge.
The participants created personas based on themselves including:
“Circular economy ain’t the new ‘in thing’, it’s basic common sense!”
We wanted to make the ideas relevant to people’s lives so they’d want to use them. The participants imagined different stages of their lives including working, studying, shopping and using public transport. They considered how a circular economy could help particular actions in their lives. This made it easier for them to come up with new, sustainable ideas that would be useful and appealing. These included birthdays, holidays and moving house.
Here are just a few of their ideas:
We grouped the ideas into different circular economy models:
Then participants worked in pairs to develop their ideas. We provided concept cards with prompts such as:
Our approach to generating ideas is to encourage prototyping throughout the workshop. By bringing ideas to life, we start to ask more questions and delve deeper into how products and services could be better. It ensures participants really think through their concepts as they generate them.
The participants were full of ideas to make things last. But the big challenge is creating lasting behaviour change. As Snook’s own Ness Wright says in a popular blog she wrote at the time “the role of the designer is to make the sustainable thing the best thing”. We need to design products and services that people want to use, rather than just ‘feel they should’. Working with real people that will (or won’t!) adopt them is the way to ensure we design viable, desirable and sustainable products and services.
Zero waste Scotland continues to offer a range of services, including a circular economy accelerator.
“The big hairy audacious goal here is to create an incentive to reuse and recycle items. This reduces or even eliminates raw material extraction.”
