One of the things that bothers me, is the amount of waste we produce, and our disposable, throw away culture. Because of that, there is a certain amount of environmental consciousness that has gone into several aspects of our products. One of the main things is in making the products easily user-repairable. When combined with availability of individual replacement parts, this dramatically extends the life of our products.
When was the last time you had a part of something you bought, break, where you didn’t have to replace the whole thing? When was the last time you could easily repair a product without special tools? What was the last product you had that tried to make it to your benefit to repair the product by making it as easy as possible?
We talk about recycling, but we should focus first on reducing our consumables, re-using or re-purposing them to extend their life, and recycling as the last resort, but still preferable to trashing something outright. But the reality is that most electronic products aren’t worth repairing when they break, and a lot aren’t particularly reusable or recyclable. Because of the nature and speed of advancement, planned obsolescence is way too common.
We are proponents of the right to repair as well. We want you to be able to fix our products if something happens, for a reasonable price. This might not be the most lucrative approach to running a business that makes physical products, but it is way more ethical, and far less wasteful. Hopefully our customers will appreciate those aspects of our company and products and buy more products from us as a result.
Environmentally, 3D Printing is a good thing. 3D Printing isn’t a fast process, in fact it takes over 24 hours of printing to produce just one of our MiniCine Lights (but not that much electricity). The advantage, is that there is very little plastic waste in general, and compared to plastic mold injection. It has a fraction of the waste that goes into CNC parts, where all of the unused parts of your billeted aluminum stock, or steel parts have to be cut away. Conversely about the only waste there is in 3D printing, is the support structures and brims we use and the occasional failed print. We minimize these, both in our designs and our printing setups, to not only save time, energy, and resources, but also to reduce waste. Additionally, reducing support structures can leave nicer finishes and reduce cleanup needed to prep the part for sale.
Because we can produce replacement parts on the fly, we don’t have to keep a large supply of spare parts in stock, and even out of production products can be supported since we can pull up the 3D model and print it on demand, so replacement part support doesn’t disappear after some arbitrary end of life timeline.
I looked into the recyclable aspects of the plastics used in our products. At this time, most of our products are made of PETG, but that may change as new materials become available or easier to print, or more affordable, or if different materials become necessary for certain designs. With regard to recycling, PETG is a little tricky; while it should fall into the recycle code 1, which covers PET and PETE, and PETG and is the easiest and most widely accepted plastic to recycle, 3D printing PETG seems to be slightly different, and most consider it a code 7 plastic which falls under the “other” category. This may change as 3D printing filaments become more ubiquitous. It isn’t that 3D printed PETG isn’t easily recyclable, it is just that it doesn’t mix well with standard PET, and would need to be processed only with other 3D PETG, so as processing becomes available for that, there might be additional options for recycling. We will certainly keep an eye on this and intend to recycle all of our waste if possible.
On that topic, our products are designed to have a long life, and be easily repairable, so hopefully recyclability will mostly be a non issue for our products. Also most of the repairs that may need to be done could be done with a temperature controlled soldering iron (or standard, in a pinch), plastic welder, 3D Pen, or in some cases a hair dryer or heat gun (not to mention superglue options). We plan to have videos demonstrating how to do these repairs at home, but haven’t made any, because in spite of having at least a couple of dozen lights in use, we’ve only damaged one light to the point of needing repair, and instead of repairing it, I redesigned the light to be about ten times stronger at the break point, than the one that broke. So we will likely have to intentionally damage some parts to show how to repair them.
So, hopefully you see why our products and approach are very different from most corporate approaches, and are geared towards the consumer and personal repairability. So, while we aren’t out there actively removing plastics from the ocean, hopefully our approach will make it so none of our plastic ever makes it into the ocean.
