Circularity starts with designing products smart and choosing the right materials. Doing the laundry showed me last week that a beautiful Dutch start-up Seepje wins hands-down from Korea electronics giant Samsung. But also Apple can improve (a lot). How so….?
While shopping I noticed a new washing liquid from Seepje in our supermarket. The packaging directly struck me as well design from a circularity point of view. 97 % recycled HDPE used without any printed ink on it, and an easy to remove carton label. Chapeau! Looking at the story behind Seepje it only became better. The washing liquid is made from the Himalayan Sapindus mukorossi fruit, with very few synthetic additions. Great! Hope these guys will be wildly succesful!
Our 7 year old Samsung washing machine was functioning just fine… until one morning the door handle spontaneously broke off…. and the door could not be opened anymore. Samsung told me they were not sure if it could be fixed, and sending someone to check it would cost about the same as buying a new (and more energy efficient) washing machine. So we bought a new one. But it does not feel good! If the handle would have been designed more robust we could have continued to use the washing machine and not create a lot of waste. So dear engineers at Samsung…. you have to do a better job in choosing the material for the door handle and designing the shape!
And Apple…. well …. upon setting up Kiduara I handed in my old iPad and replaced it with a new one. And guess what…. the new iPad 2018 is about 1 mm thicker so the ancillary keyboard cover does not fit anymore. What a waste….. this generates unnecessary consumption without adding any new functionality. So Apple engineers: design so that we do NOT need to buy new gadgets!
