I’ve made the point elsewhere that you can’t just make a ‘circular economy’ light fixture; you have to enable a circular economy process. Much of the current conversation still revolves around the original manufacturer being able to provide an upgrade or refurbishment of their own fixtures, but that’s nowhere near good enough to handle the situation that we will soon experience in the real world. But what needs to happen instead?
I enjoyed a heartening few days last week, with some surprising indicators as to where Circularity will gain traction – provided the manufacturers all come out to play with the rest of us!
The Right to Repair
On Monday I watched the recording of a webinar organised by the Royal Academy of Engineering – a new body to me I must admit. The focus was on local communities having the ability to repair consumer goods rather than needing to replace a product because a repair isn’t affordable. Two words might be useful to us: MODULARITY and INTEROPERABILITY. And I can sense the cold shiver running down the spine of product managers from here, because those two words suggest OPEN SOURCE when it comes to replaceability. But if we’re serious about Circularity, that’s the kind of situation we need to aim for.
I wrote about this in The Light Review: Circularity and the Right to Repair
Cost vs Resilience
On Wednesday I was asked by Voltimum to host a roundtable discussion on that thorny topic of how we get out of the zero-sum race-to-the-bottom so beloved by our Value Engineering colleagues. We know the rules of this game: the money on the table is reduced and reduced until everyone is obliged to drop out, leaving the victor as the company that can provide the cheapest, shoddiest, most unreliable, product because that’s all the VE allows for. And it’s a game where no one gets out alive; more of a version of Russian Roulette where none of the chambers are empty.
The non-zero-sum game that we have to aim for is to bring RESILIENCE into the tendering process; teaching clients, projects managers and contractors that the current game is short-termist and certainly not to the client’s advantage. But Resilience needs to be promoted across the board if its to make any sense. And that’s where out good friends at LIA can be a mighty influence to alter the mindset, both of our manufacturing community and of the wider client body.
If you missed it, you can watch the discussion here: Cost vs Resilience: How this affects the UK lighting industry
On Friday I sent my PowerPoint presentation to Recolight, in advance of this week’s latest Circular Economy webinar: Designing sustainable luminaires. I’ll be talking about the work that’s going on to produce a lighting specific BSI standard for the remanufacturing process. This is all about BS8887, a standard that’s been around for some years in other guises; we’ve been working out what needs to be done to make it relevant to the UK lighting sector.
You can register for the webinar here: Recolight: Designing sustainable luminaires
The Right to Repair (redux)
And then on Saturday, my partner and I went along to the first Repair Café in Sherborne. Annabel is an adherent of the Visible Stitch movement; known as Sashiko stitching (sashiko translates from Japanese as ‘little stabs). It’s a creative way of adding life to clothes in a very creative way – and, again, a serious element within the Right to repair movement. Women – and men! – all around the country are being taught how to repair their old and damaged clothes, and that’s a great contribution to Slow Fashion.
I got caught up in a discussion about what’s going on with other Repair Cafes and the range of activity is extraordinary. There is also an international network of Repair Cafes and, to get away from the idea that this might all be a bit scuzzy and only one above the church jumble sale, there is The Repair Monitor .
This is basically a database of repairs requested and fulfilled, but that’s only the start. The RM database collates information on repaired items from all around the world and that provides the information that initiates conversation with manufacturers for better designed products, with governments for better legislation, and with consumers for more careful use of their equipment.
Here’s a brief video that sets the scene for the way that the Repair Monitor works.
.
Putting all of this together
I feel that I’ve been able to see my elephant . . .
(from Wikipedia: The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.)
I’ve been talking with manufacturers who have access to government and to the professional bodies that oversee the industry; I’ve spoken with influencers within the industry whose aim is to improve the way that we do things, not just for the future, but for right now; and I’ve enjoyed talking to those on the streets and in the community halls who are asking why things that are bust can’t be fixed.
Put that all together and the direction is plain: fixtures designed and manufactured for their Circularity capabilities will only come from those companies who appreciate – and act on – their responsibilities to ensure that replacement components are available years down the line . . .and that those two words, MODULARITY and INTEROPERABILITY become cornerstones of the product design process.
.
