Circular Economy: Offending and Winning Products in My Home (2021 edition)
Offenders: These products generate high amounts of waste or a hostile user experience, due to seemingly deliberate choices.
A popular, arguably comfortable wireless keyboard and mouse combination. The offense? You are forced to throw away a perfectly working keyboard and mouse if the USB connection dongle stops working. That’s right. Unlike the competition, Microsoft’s USB connection dongle can not be replaced separately from the keyboard and mouse.
Our little one enjoys snacking on this apparently delicious cheese. The offense? Needing to remove and discard six different packaging materials before you can get to the actual cheese — net bag closures, net bag, paper label, plastic film, wax cover strip, wax cover. To paraphrase the popular Bollywood movie, Sholay (stop reading here if you are not a Bollywood aficionado ;-): “Chhe packaging, aur cheese ek? Bahut na-insafi hai!”
3. Philips Avent baby milk bottles:
An easy-to-clean, comfortable baby bottle. Kudos to Philips for designing it in such a way that the bottle continues to be useful as your baby grows — by making it interoperable with other parts — from nipples with increasing flow rates to other attachments for converting this milk feeding bottle into a sippy cup. The offense? Think you can just buy new attachments to convert your existing bottles to a sippy cup? Think again! Attachments (typically, different types of lids) are not sold separately. Each attachment is sold together with its own bottle. So if you already have enough feeding bottles and want to convert some to cups.. You may not. Not without buying additional useless bottles.
Winners: These everyday products directly result in less waste compared to popular alternatives.
Delicious, non-homogenized, organic milk. Sold in glass bottles that can be returned and reused. Their website states, “On average our bottles have a return rate of 80% and get reused 5 times…” Compare this to the alternative of buying milk in plastic containers and trashing them after use.
For Strauss, this is just the customer-facing aspect of the circular economy. Behind the scenes, the company uses cow dung manure as fertilizer to regenerate the soil.
2. Thång Phåt Bamboo Straw
Everyone knows kids love to drink with a straw.. And that plastic straws are terrible for the environment! Reusable bamboo straws keep kids happy while being completely natural and biodegradable. (The only thing is that we parents need to remember to carry them wherever we go and clean them after use).
These diapers are reusable, cost less overall, and create less waste.Their adaptive design enables adjusting or increasing their size as the baby grows. Our baby typically used 700 to 800 single-use disposable diapers over a period of six months. When we switched to these reusable, stay-dry cloth diapers, we needed just 15 of them for the next six months and they are still in good shape.
Do write to me if you have products that you like/ dislike for their design / business strategy that impacts their use and corresponding waste generation.
