What does sustainability mean for a product?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm your host today and talking about what does sustainability mean for a product. As this series on launching a product, I focus on how to actually launch a product in the smartest and best way possible. And so Sustainability is something that comes up quite often. It's something that my firm, Peterman Design Firm, we focus on how to make the products that we develop as sustainable as possible. And what it actually means is quite a few different things. Sustainability can mean different things. There's different areas of sustainability. It's kind of a blanket term that refers to anything that is Recycling, reuse, biodegradable, manufacturing process can be sustainable or not as well, and kind of separate from those, you— and raw material. And I'm gonna talk about all, all 5 of those areas. The first, recycle. So when we talk about sustainability for a product, something that is recyclable falls into that category because you can take the material that made that product Break it down, reprocess it, and turn it into either completely raw material— so that's something like taking an aluminum can, melting it down, making another aluminum can out of it. That's recycling. It's taking that material, processing it down into a raw material, and then reforming it, reprocessing it into a new product. Recycling is very Important. It's very, you know, very well known by everyone. However, recycling is limited in which materials can actually be recycled. A lot of materials can't actually be recycled. Metals are definitely ones that typically can be recycled. Plastics, they go both ways, and it's a good start. It's a great place to be for products where you can't have something that fits into the other categories. But by no means is it the end-all be-all. It's just a place to start. Second, reusing. So reuse comes in a few different flavors. It's all the way from we have a product that simply is designed to basically never fall apart. It's repairable. You're able to reuse it constantly. So things that replace, you know, so like Ziploc bags that are reusable bags, they're designed to replace something that was disposable with something that is reusable, making that product into a similar product or something else that you're able to reuse the product, but it's not in its exact form anymore. So you remove components, add components, turn it into a new product, but it's without having to break it all the way down into raw components before making it into a new product. Third, biodegradable. So this one's pretty self-explanatory. This one, the material or the product, once you're done using it, biodegrades and turns into dirt. Now there's different levels of this. There's all the way from I could take this product, Throw it in the dirt, and in 6 weeks you could never find the product because it's fully biodegraded into the dirt. It literally can be turned into dirt. Yeah. The next stage is stuff that requires— they require a longer time. And then there's also industrial biodegradable materials. So these are ones that an industrial composting facility would be able to biodegrade the material using, you know, specific bacteria or other, other organisms that break down the material quickly. And they can do it quickly in terms of, you know, weeks, maybe months. Whereas if you were to say discard it in your backyard, it may take months to years in order to biodegrade. It doesn't mean it won't, But industrial, industrial composting will speed it up into a reasonable amount of time. So biodegradable is great when creating sustainable products. We have to be careful about how we use biodegradable description because it can mean different things. So being aware of that, there's different levels, and so that can impact how you market product, things like that. Now, what does sustainability mean for manufacturing processes? So you can make a biodegradable product, but possibly your manufacturing process has waste or other things that come from it that are not sustainable at all. And so when you're creating a sustainable product, if you're looking at it holistically, then you're going to be looking at, yes, end of life. What do you do when you throw it away? you know, cradle-to-cradle, cradle-to-grave concepts. You also should be looking at what are the manufacturing processes, and are those processes environmentally friendly? Are they sustainable? Are they done in a way that doesn't, you know, undo how good the product is? So say your product removes a pound of carbon each time you make one, but the manufacturing process to make the product generates the same amount that you won't have to get rid of. You know, your, your environmental impact could actually be neutral because of your manufacturing processes. And so really being aware of what those are, you know, people are more aware of it, the consumer is more aware of it, and oftentimes there's ways to work around it. So being aware of manufacturing processes is really important in order to Determine how sustainable a product is. The last area, raw materials. So this is where we get into how is raw material created and how is it initially processed. Pretty much no raw material comes straight out ready to use. Use wood, you know, you chop down a tree, you're still going to have to remove the bark and you're gonna have to cut it into whatever size planks you're going to use in order to make an actual product out of it. You're going to— when you dig up metal, when you mine for ore of any kind, you're going to mine the ore, then you're going to process it before it turns into just iron or, you know, whatever other metal it is. And then you're going to end up processing it again, typically into some kind of alloy. This is very rare that we use pure iron or pure any material. We typically in metals blend them. So you got to think about what is the raw material? How are you getting it from its initial state into a usable state before it's processed? And there's, of course, things like avoiding conflict-free minerals and, you know, making sure that there is good working conditions and things like that. But being aware of how you get your raw materials, how your supply chain gets those raw materials can be really important. And it's something that people are becoming more and more aware of. And when you're saying that this product is sustainable, in order to say that with a complete holistic approach and say that every part of the product is sustainable, you have to think about raw materials and how those are acquired and processed as well. So what does sustainability mean for a product? Depends on how much you dug into the entire lifecycle of the product and how sustainable Every part of it is. There are people that say this marketing material, this product is sustainable, and it really just means that it's recyclable plastic. Has nothing to do with the manufacturing process, has to do with just the fact that you can recycle it at the end of your use. Other companies and other businesses and approaches look at the entire supply chain, raw material, to end of life, whatever that looks like, whether it's recycling, reusing, biodegrading, repairing, whatever that looks like, that whole process can be looked at and is part of what they call sustainable. And in my opinion, if you're going to say a product is really sustainable, then I think we should be talking about manufacturing processes, raw material, and end of life. And that will give you a full picture of how sustainable Product is. 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 want to 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.