It’s virtually impossible to be interested in fabbing or mass customisation and not know about the cool stuff Ponoko are doing, both in enabling consumers to manufacture self designed products and in providing a marketplace for those products to be sold. And the news that they are establishing a global head office and manufacturing facility in San Francisco hopefully shows that Ponoko is already doing well enough to start expanding. I know I’m a bit late in posting about this announcement, but what I found especially interesting was the emphasis placed on the environmental benefits of this new set-up.

Ponoko has appointed Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, to its board of advisors, and writes in its press release that

“Being able to make products on-demand, close to where people live, reduces waste and cuts down on the carbon emissions associated with transporting products to consumers. Our facilities in San Francisco mean that we’re starting to see this become a reality in the United States, and the appointment of Graham to our board of advisors is a huge endorsement of Ponoko’s vision for a more sustainable approach to the way goods are created, made and delivered.”

In the original plan for my PhD I proposed to look at some of the environmental implications of rapid manufacturing. Unfortunately it’s one of the parts which has been shaved off as I focussed the research and got to grips with exactly what I’d taken on; indeed I’ve no doubt that there’s a whole PhD waiting for someone who’s interested in this area. But it’s still an issue I’m interested in, and up until now the positive possibilities of local manufacturing facilities isn’t something that had occurred to me.

The first, somewhat obvious reaction to the notion of consumer-oriented manufacturing is that it has to be a bad thing environmentally. If the means of production are brought closer to the end user, both physically and in terms of when manufacture occurs in relation to sale, production becomes easier and cheaper and so it’s necessarily valued less. As more things are produced, correspondingly more things will be discarded.

There are a number of reasons to question whether this will necessarily be the case though. The first, which seems to be talked about increasingly, is the possibility of using recyclable materials in the rapid manufacturing process. 3D printers such as those from Z Corp already recycle unused material within the machine, but in theory the part itself could be made from materials which can later be recycled, in the same way that conventional plastics or metals are recycled today. However this seems to me to be something of a false argument: whilst recycling discarded waste is a good thing, it’s undoubtedly better not to produce the waste in the first place. As such, arguing that recyclable materials will lead to more environmentally sustainable practices just avoids the issue of whether rapid manufacturing will lead to shorter life cycles for products.

A better argument to my mind, is that whilst some parts of a product might be discarded more often, other parts will be discarded less. In the consumer electronics field where my work is concentrating, consumers will replace products for three reasons - to gain access to new technology, for fashion, or because the product is broken. Where a consumer is replacing a product because they want the newest technology, rapid manufacturing may not have an answer, but in the other two circumstances it may in fact lead to a reduction in waste.

Reuters recently reported on a phenomenon it called ‘Urban Mining’ - recovering precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, which has become increasingly lucrative as the price of gold, silver and copper has risen. According to the Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, a recycling firm quoted by Reuters:

A tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams (0.18 ounce) of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield 150 grams (5.3 ounce) or more.

Scrap metal from discarded electronics products © Thomson Reuters

It’s an almost universal complaint that these days phones have too much functionality, a complaint that’s backed up by a report I remember seeing which showed that 80% of a typical phone’s features are used once or less by its owner. And yet still we’re seduced by the look of the latest model. Imagine if instead of replacing the entire phone you could change the entire look and feel by adding new covers, or other parts. The old ones might be thrown away, but the guts of the product, the technology which contains the lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury which are poisoning poorer regions of the world, would instead be retained.

A similar argument applies when it comes to products which are broken. Although it’s obviously annoying when a product breaks, the vast majority of certain kinds of consumer electronics (mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops, DVD players) are discarded long before they wear out. The exceptions tend to be those products where for whatever reason fashion plays less of a role in purchase decisions (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens etc), and so it somehow becomes okay to hang onto them for longer. But even here, it’s rarely that the whole product is broken; the problem is that as a product gets older, the chance that the manufacturer continues to support it by making spare parts decreases. It can even be that repairing the product is more expensive (and almost certainly more hassle) than buying a new one - in the UK, Dyson vacuum cleaners are one of the few household products people take for repair. Undoubtedly this is partly due to the initial high cost of the machine relative to other cleaners, but it’s also encouraged by a five year warranty, together with Dyson’s commitment to continue manufacturing spare parts for all machines back to the first model made in 1993. In future, rapid manufacturing might further encourage products to be repaired rather than discarded, if for example Dyson only needed to make the 3D files for spare parts available for download, rather than keep inventory of old stock. Consumers might print spare parts themselves, or visit repair shops where parts could be printed and fitted the same day.

Dyson DC02 vacuum cleaner from 1995 © Dyson

There’s one final reason why rapid manufacturing may not lead to an increase in waste. In her PhD thesis, Ruth Mugge looked at reasons why people become attached to products, and why some products more than others. She argues that one way consumers develop an emotional attachment is through an involvement in the product’s design, or through customising the product during ownership. A product in which a consumer has invested time, thought and creativity becomes more valuable to that person, and consequently they are less likely to discard or replace it.

This brings us back to Ponoko again. Because in enabling people to design and manufacture their own products, it’s difficult to imagine those products are then discarded with as little consideration as something bought off the shelf. Even those who visit Ponoko just to buy designs that someone else has created are able to engage with the product’s story, and the designer behind it, in a way that is impossible in a normal purchasing experience. I’m still a long way from being convinced that rapid manufacturing will be good for the environment, but I’m starting to see why it might at least be better than the conventional methods of manufacture we have now.