Environmentally-aware design

Check the chair you are sitting on. Is it made to be taken apart when it is no longer used? Eco-design ensures that products are made to be recycled.

Raw-material production, be it plastic, steel or food, is energy intensive and therefore the most polluting stage in the product’s life cycle. Some raw materials are so valuable that they create fighting and conflict as well as the environmental damage caused by their extraction and production.  There are therefore more and more manufacturers who design and manufacture their products on the basis of a different perspective – that the product after its first life should continue to be useful as something else. 

“All our chairs are recyclable and are made purely from recycled or renewable materials”, explains environmental director Carl Petter Aaser in Håg AS.

Environmentally-friendly product design means that attention is paid to the environment already at the product-development stage. “Five principles govern how we design and manufacture our chairs. They should have low weight, fewer parts, be made of recycled or renewable materials, they should have a long life-span and we think from cradle to cradle throughout the entire production process. It is hard to get hold of enough recycled materials, but the parts from the chairs can be re-used”, says Aaser.

The plastic in Håg’s chairs originated as bottle tops, some are also from Volvo bumper bars and from shampoo and soap bottles. In Norway, the recycling proportion is over 60 percent but with better incentives, more information and last but not least, better-designed products, it will be possible to achieve a recycling rate of 95 percent.