See how startups can make hardware without ruining the planet

TL;DR: Integrate sustainability into product design as early as possible

No one starts a hardware company with the express purpose of destroying as much of the planet as possible. However, walking through the trunk of CES, I noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, very little attention was paid to material selection, reparability, ease of disassembly, and end-of-life considerations.

It’s really embarrassing, but as someone who’s done a hardware startup myself, I know it can be hard to prioritize when you’re short on time and resources. However, as a startup founder, if you can’t make green choices when the burden is literally on you, when can you?

To find out how to make hardware more environmentally friendly, we spoke with Lauryn Menard, a professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches the future of biodesign. She is also a consultant for Women in Design SF and co-founder and creative director of Estudio PROWL, an Oakland, California-based futures and materials design consultancy focused on sustainable solutions.

“As a startup you have options. The problem is that we live in such a capitalist society and many decisions are made on the basis of time and money,” explains Menard. Startups want to think about sustainability, but they move at lightning speed and try to get a product on the market as quickly as possible. “News should reach your target price and all that good stuff.”

But there are some important things moving in the market. Consumer demands are changing and climate commitments, circular strategies and environmental issues are emerging. It’s hard to say if enough customers are making purchasing decisions based on a company’s green credentials to move the needle in a meaningful way, but product development cycles can take years and who knows what the landscape will look like when your product hits the road market comes. Market. It may make sense for some companies to take the risk, but other founders are starting to think differently about how products are made.

“If a startup is run entirely by engineers, this can be problematic – engineers tend to care more [about] make sure they make it to the finish line. They put all of their energy into making something that works, and they’re probably borrowing from materials, manufacturing processes and manufacturing processes that they’re already familiar with,” explains Menard. “What we saw [be] Working with a design studio that specializes in more sustainable thinking and healthier materials is very helpful. Or work with someone as a materials library to get them thinking about the functionality of the materials from the prototyping stage. Just as it takes a long time to get an MVP product that performs and looks the way you want it to, sometimes it takes a long time to integrate a new material into an existing production process.”

think sustainability

One of the big challenges in developing more sustainable products is that we often replace plastic with something else. The problem is that plastics are already deeply integrated into work processes. Product designers love how predictable, easy to design and repeatable plastic is.

There’s also no obvious substitute for plastic; Depending on your usage situation and the properties of the material you need, you may need to substitute wool, paper, wood, vegetable pulp, carbon fiber, algae, hemp, mycelium, lab-grown leather, or any other available material.

Founders and product designers can do this to think more consciously about sustainability and product development.