Sustainability and the product life cycle
Design & Technology · Key Stage 3 · The School
The life cycle
Raw material extraction → processing → manufacture → distribution → use → disposal. Every stage has an environmental cost, and the biggest one is not always where you expect: for a washing machine most impact is in USE, for a plastic bottle most is in materials and disposal. Designing well means knowing which stage dominates.
The six Rs
REDUCE the material used. REUSE the product or its parts. RECYCLE the material. REFUSE what is unnecessary. RETHINK the whole approach. REPAIR rather than replace. They are ordered roughly by usefulness: reducing beats recycling, because recycling still costs energy and most materials degrade each cycle.
Reading a claim
'Recyclable' means it CAN be recycled somewhere, not that it will be. 'Biodegradable' often means only under industrial composting conditions. 'Carbon neutral' depends entirely on what was counted and what was offset. Ask what was measured, over what boundary, and who checked.
PHONE A: replaced every two years, each one recyclable. Three phones made, three sets of mining, manufacturing and shipping — and manufacturing is the large majority of a phone's lifetime carbon. PHONE B: kept six years, repaired once with a new battery, not recyclable at end of life. B is the lower-impact choice by a wide margin. Recyclable describes the end; the six Rs put reduce and reuse first for this reason.
Most of what happens at the end of a product is decided at the beginning, by a designer. Screws instead of glue mean it can be opened. One polymer instead of seven bonded together means it can be recycled without separating them first. A standard screw head rather than a proprietary one means somebody other than the manufacturer can repair it. A replaceable battery outlives the phone around it. DESIGN FOR DISASSEMBLY is the lever a designer actually holds.