Five R's
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[edit] The Five R’s of Green-Saving design (5-R’s)
The “Five R’s” of “Green-Saving” design were coined by innovation firm 12gurus [1] to aid manufacturers and producers in reducing environmental and financial waste. The 5-R’s are Refuse, Reduce, Recycle, Reuse, and Reinvent, and in that order progress in benefit to the environment.
[edit] Brief definitions of the Five R’s:
Refuse: allow the client to turn down something they don’t need
Reduce: cut the size of materials while boosting their effect
Recycle: turn old into new
Reuse: find a way to use one thing twice, rather than two things once
Reinvent: examine your values and re-create a product that matches your story.
[edit] Real-world examples of the Five R’s in action:
Refuse: ATM’s allow a customer to refuse a receipt. Each time a customer chooses not to receive a printed receipt a slip of paper, a small tree, ink, and printer wear-and-tear is saved.
Reduce: 12gurus, the firm that coined the Five R’s, campaigns for firms to reduce their printed output by 10%, simply by reducing the size of printed items. A default business card is two inches tall, by removing a quarter inch, for every 5000 printed, 1000 cards become “free” for the environment, and the printing company.
Recycle: Old car parts are scrapped, melted, and recycled into fresh steel for cars. (While a great method, this is less idea than Reusing. Firstly, recycling often costs more in energy consumption than it saves. Further, many car parts will last for decades in landfills, and if manufacturers agreed to strip their old cars and reuse these parts, such as plastic tanks, less new materials would be taken from the environment and less toxicity would be added to our landfills.
Reuse: While made of plastic, which is less eco-friendly than wood, a mechanical pencil is reusable, whereas a wood pencil is entirely lost once used.
Reinvent: Sometimes the old way of doing things isn’t worth modifying. What’s the fastest way to send a letter to someone across the ocean? FedEx and UPS have spent millions refining their methods – they’ll never be the best. Email reinvented the way we send messages, eliminating paper from the equation.
[edit] 5-R progression of environmental benefit
• Refuse: the least beneficial, as the product has already been created. Refusing only delays future production of the same product.
• Reduce: Now less raw materials are needed, although raw materials are being consumed.
• Recycle: In an ideal world this would simply transform junk into valuable materials, however the process consumes tremendous energy resources to the point where many municipalities have stopped recycling claiming it causes more damage than benefit to the environment.
• Reuse: A product is used multiple times before it is discarded or recycled, no raw materials are consumed.
• Reinvent: When environmental considerations are factored at the beginning, designers can avoid using materials and skip extraneous features – leaving the raw materials in the earth for the future.
