Launching a Product - How to make your product more sustainable?

Hello, welcome to the Conscious Design Series, Launching a Product. I'm your host, Ian Peterman of Peterman Design Firm, and today I want to talk about how to make your product more sustainable. Now, this is something that I get asked by clients who are looking to develop a new product and wanting to make their product more sustainable. They're looking at options on, you know, just how do you make a product more sustainable? What are the areas that you can, you can look at in order to say this product is more sustainable than this product? So I want to break this down into just a couple areas. You know, it's what are the impacts? What, what are those impacts and sustainability that a product can have? Second, where we can reduce. What areas are good areas to look at to help reduce, especially when compared to products that are considered sustainable today? And third, talking about longevity. How long does this product last? What does, what does that look like? And how we can make that process more sustainable as well. So first, what are the impacts? How can a product impact The environment, what makes it sustainable or not sustainable. So a product has many different areas of impact. It has raw materials, manufacturing processes, as well as how it gets to your customer and what happens after your customer is done with it. What happens when it breaks or when it's no longer needed? So when you're looking at your impacts, you want to think about your lifecycle. So really You need to do a lifecycle analysis. What is the lifecycle of your product? How long does it go? How long is it used? What is the beginning of it? You know, how is it manufactured? What is raw materials? How does it get produced? How does it get transported? How does it get to your end customer? What does your end customer do with it? How long is it supposed to last? How long will it last? You know, there's, you know, You know, it's like shelf life of food. They put a shelf life on it. It doesn't mean it goes bad instantaneously once that date is hit, but that's like the safe date, right? And it will go longer. So your product will last longer typically. You know, your warranty goes to date X 'cause you know for certain it'll work really well through then, and it usually ends up lasting longer. That's how you end up with, you know, Toyotas and Hondas that have a million miles on them. They were never designed to really go that far, and no manufacturer was going to say that their cars could last that long, but they can. So thinking about what your— the impact of your product is requires being aware of the entire life cycle, which is always good to know. Next, so second, reduce what you can. So when you're making a product more sustainable, there's a few areas that we can look at that aren't always looked at, especially by smaller companies. And so they can sometimes make a really big impact in how sustainable your product is and therefore how much you're helping the environment and how much people will be interested in your product. So first is transportation. Now, a lot of companies, they focus on how to make the product cheaper, how to make it, you know, even with sustainable materials, they look at initial production costs, not transportation. And transportation is a huge part of sustainability in terms of product. If you have to ship the product 100,000 miles around based on, you know, how many times it bounces between different manufacturing locations, raw material— if it takes a lot of miles to get to a final product and then deliver it, then it's not as sustainable as it would be if you could find a single location where all raw material came to, produced your product, and then shipped straight to your customer. Minimizing the transportation required in a product is important. The second area is manufacturing processes. So a lot of people care about the material that it's made out of, when— what is the impact of the product at the end of life, but How is the manufacturing process? Is it a wasteful process? Do you waste a whole bunch of material in making it? You know, do you start with a 5-pound block and slowly whittle it down to a quarter pound, and all that material is unrecyclable, unsavable, unreusable? What does that look like? What— do you use highly toxic chemicals in order to process the material into what you need? You know, there's— maybe the material itself is very sustainable, but The materials used to convert that material into a product are not. So being aware of what that is, you can sometimes make a really big impact on sustainability by looking at the manufacturing process that you actually use to make your product. Now, sometimes there's manufacturing processes you can't get around, so there's ways to offset or make up for that. Which people do, you know, something that even the transportation you can carbon offset. For example, UPS, you can click a little button when you're ordering and paying for shipment and you can say reduce or offset carbon footprint. And they do things like plant trees in order to offset the carbon impact that your package made. So there's ways to offset, but there's also ways to actually just change manufacturing process to be something that's more sustainable. And better for the environment while still producing a product that you can use that is sustainable and has sustainable materials. Third area, raw materials. So this one's the most well-known. Everyone thinks about this one. Raw materials. What is the actual material that you're using to make your product? And what I want to talk about a little bit is we all think about the base material, right? Oh, I make this product out of bamboo and it's really sustainable and super great. Well, I've seen a lot of products that are made out of bamboo. However, the coating that they put on, the lacquer they put on, definitely was not. And so you've got to think about not just the raw material at the core, what is the finish? If you're using paint, what is that paint? Is that paint sustainable? Is that a sustainably made paint? Is it a Biodegradable paint, because if your bamboo is biodegradable but you just coated it in a bunch of stuff that's not biodegradable, your product is actually not— no longer 100% biodegradable, and you can't honestly claim it. You could say it, but you can't honestly say that because you're gonna end up with a bunch of paint that's sitting there. Now, it's not like we use lead paint and things, at least not as much as we used to, so We don't have necessarily extremely terrible things all the time, but you want to think about if you're painting it, what is the paint? If you're clear coating it, what is the clear coat? If you're powder coating it, if you're, if you're doing something in order to add a finish to it, what is that process and material as well? And being aware of that is going to help make you be able to create a more sustainable product. And last area that I want to talk about is longevity. So one of the easiest things you can do to make a product more sustainable is make it last longer. Products that last longer work longer. They require replacement less often, which means just less products being made in order to do the job that your product is supposed to do. So this is why people really gravitate and, and have been wanting to develop and launch Reusable products, creating products that are lasting longer. They're going to automatically, even if they're manufactured in the same way, same materials, but they're designed to last twice as long. They're literally going to be twice as sustainable as their other competitor product because single use is the worst product unless it's 100% biodegradable. But even then, you're still expending energy and resources in order to make the product. So the best solution and easiest solution that you can quickly do in order to make something more sustainable is make it last longer. Make the product actually function better in order to last longer, and it will be more sustainable. Now, this doesn't always work. You know, I've worked in products in medical dental world where nobody wants a reusable product because. It's contamination, gets gross. Nobody wants that. So there's areas where you can't extend the longevity of a product because of sanitation or other reasons. So obviously don't do it there. But everywhere else, having a product last longer typically is a good thing. And it's very easy, in theory at least, to make a product that lasts longer than a cheaper product. Of course, the pushback on that is going to cost more, but if you can make something that lasts longer and actually over time is cheaper, then you can have a product that is more sustainable with a minimal amount of effort. You know, if you prove all the other areas too, then you should have a winner on your hands in terms of sustainability. So hopefully this gives you an idea of how to make your product more sustainable. Kind of areas to be aware of that most people don't look into that you could be different and set yourself apart by looking into and being aware of your impacts. And of course, make your product last longer. That will definitely help as well. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. and like the video. If you wanna learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.