Katie Coyne explores what sustainable materials are and how innovative businesses around the world are using them to create alternatives to single-use products.
Defining a sustainable material is not as straightforward as it seems.
To tackle the triple planetary threat of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution, we need to tackle overconsumption and ask ourselves do we really need a product.
Sustainable products and materials are subject to all manner of claims, and while a material may be “better” in some ways for the environment it may still have some negative environmental consequences.
Without tackling overconsumption, and without having a system that repairs, reuses, and recycles, it’s not possible to have truly sustainable materials or products.
Sarah Bloomquist co-founder of the circular economy network (CEN) in the US, said: “Sustainable to me, would mean that the materials can be circulated back into the economy or the environment without further damage, and that’s where the grey space of how you measure that comes in.”
It might be helpful to think of materials striving towards sustainability within an imperfect system.
Some may be “less bad” for the environment but the progress may be small and may even fall into greenwashing.
Others may be “transition” materials that are helping humanity move towards sustainability but once this painful process is completed they may become defunct.
Painful because change is difficult for humans: We are evolutionarily wired to survive, in other words not to change.
Change is painful because it represents uncertainty, and in our historic past sticking to what is known produced a higher likelihood of staying alive.
When we are uncertain, anxious or fearful, the older – evolutionary speaking – part of our brain that is responsible for survival, and maintaining the status quo, kicks in and overrides the thinking part of our brain that wants change.
This is why change is so hard to achieve. It is a big component of how addiction works and will take deliberate, supported, and sustained effort to tackle our addiction to “stuff”.
What are the alternatives to single-use products?
Banning single-use plastics, which many countries in the global north have instigated to varying degrees, is an example of a regulatory approach.
The private sector has responded to this through the creation of alternative products, which is a tried and tested means of kicking a bad habit.
As Georgie Oatley, communications manager at Solinatra, points out we have not yet all transitioned to walking around with reusable, refillable utensils, cups, bottles, etc.
Life is fast-paced and there is high demand for convenience foods, conveniently packaged.
Oatley argues that Solinatra offers a solution to single-use oil-based plastics in the form of bio-based plastics made out of waste from harvesting food crops and industrial food production.
“There are many products that absolutely we should be phasing out,” Oatley said, “and when we look at resource efficiency and waste hierarchy, of course, reuse is higher. But there are many products that we can’t stop using, either for hygiene reasons or practicality.
“We’ll still require single-use in certain healthcare settings. It’s [part of] this long process of decarbonisation and reaching net zero. We can’t switch overnight, and in that case, it’s better to use a product that is natural and not requiring finite resources.
“We believe it’s better to use a plant-based solution than a fossil-based solution for those single-use products.”
The Solinatra material has been used to create coffee pods. Consumers that use pods do so for their convenience so making it possible to put the whole product in the compost assists in that mindset.
However, if a manufacturer wants to use the Solinatra material in their product, all the plastic material has to be made from Solinatra plastic.
If any other material is used on another component, such as a paper lid, this has to be compostable, oil-based, plastic-free, and clearly distinguishable as a different material.
“If we position ourselves as sustainable, then we’re making sure that we are sustainable. There’s obviously a lot of greenwashing in this area, and we absolutely want to make sure we are not contributing to misinformation or misleading customers,” Oatley said.
Solinatra has some rules too around how its product can be used. Its packaging wrap, for example, can’t be used to wrap single-use plastic items.
Manufacturers have to work closely with Solinatra, as while it can be processed using the same machinery as oil-based plastics there are some differences.
Innovative materials for electrical products
Another interesting material that has the potential to revolutionise the electronics market by making products more sustainable is “D-glue”.
Glue is often used throughout the electronics industry to stick parts together but it is this process that makes electronics like phones, TVs and other gadgets, difficult to disassemble for repair.
D-glue can be used in place of traditional adhesives and because it breaks down with the application of heat, its use makes it possible to disassemble a broken product and fix the part that is broken.
Traditional adhesives do break down with heat but at much higher temperatures so the product itself would also be destroyed.
D-glue opens up the possibility of repair and extends the life, of almost a whole category of difficult-to-recycle products.
The inventors recognise that this product is more “transitional” than perfectly sustainable in its own right.
Traditional adhesives are pretty toxic materials and, D-glue, albeit very clever, still sits within that family.
However, the creators of D-glue argue that their product will bring sustainable benefits while alternative adhesives are being developed.
“There are other people out there making recyclable or reusable glues and that’s certainly an option,” says co-creator of D-glue Kristoffer Stokes, principal scientist at Geisys Ventures.
“But for me, the technical hurdles were high enough that I would rather get something imperfect out in the world designed for disassembly in a mainstream concept, than to have the perfect glue that is bio-based, recyclable, and you can recover.
“When you’re designing products, sometimes you have to make concessions, and in this case, we worked within the realm of existing materials and said, ‘right now is not the time for us to work on [fully sustainable glue]’.”
Potential sustainable materials could be anywhere
Stokes points to one of his favourite material companies UK-based Kelpi, which makes plastic packaging out of seaweed.
This is a bio-based, renewable, compostable product designed to replace oil-based plastics. When Seaweed grows it absorbs carbon and puts oxygen into the ocean.
Kelpi is working on coatings for paper and card to make longer-lasting biodegradable packaging, as well as researching paper-based alcohol bottles.
The B-corp has just recently opened a rapid prototyping lab to work with companies on solutions and take their innovations to scale.
However, we already have a lot of sustainable materials and products in use.
Cotton is probably one of the first things most people would think of when it comes to sustainable materials.
It’s a natural product that grows in the ground, biodegrades, and produces versatile breathable textiles.
However, its liberal use of pesticides and water has become more well-known and retailers have been trying to address this by using more organic cotton, which also uses a bit less water.
What is not so well known outside of the resource and recycling sector is that cotton clothing is not easily recycled back into cotton clothing in a closed loop.
The recycling process shortens the fibres in the material making them difficult to weave into quality new textiles.
Luxury fashion brand Ralph Lauren has been supporting Natural Fibre Welding (NFW) in its development of a patented process to lengthen the short fibres in recycled cotton so that they can be used with cotton and other natural fibres to create new high-quality textiles.
This would enable cotton to be recycled in a closed loop and extend its life dramatically, boosting its sustainability.
NFW has also been working on a range of alternative recycled, plant-based, and non-plastic materials.
These include its Mirum brand, which is a plastic-free alternative to leather that can be used in clothing, footwear and handbags.
Its Tunera brand provides foam, made out of natural materials as opposed to plastics, for automotive, footwear, fitness and more.
However, even with companies like NFW producing bio-based sustainable materials for fashion, and other areas, the vast amounts of waste produced by fast fashion still need to be addressed.
What could the future look like?
“We don’t want to impact the capability of future generations by being irresponsible now,” says Mark Jolly, professor of sustainable materials and manufacturing at Cranfield University.
“We want to make sure that future generations are also capable of having the same quality of life. I think that’s a major thing that you can then develop into a triple bottom line.”
Jolly also pointed to the Our Common Future/Brundtland Report commissioned by the United Nations back in 1987, which introduced the idea that sustainable development is not made at the expense of future generations.
Jolly argues that very few companies truly grasp this concept. However, there are exceptions.
He points to Interface, which buys old nets from the fishing industry in the Philippines and recycles them into carpet tiles.
This has established an industrial symbiosis: using a waste product from one industry as the raw material for another.
“Set up in the 1980s, their whole philosophy was about not leaving an imprint. If their factories or business disappeared you shouldn’t be able to identify where they’d existed,” says Jolly.
Glass container manufacturer Encirc is another company that has been working with Cranfield.
Encirc’s 360 integrated supply chain, for example, uses consolidated loading, which means beverages are transported in bulk and then bottled at a regional facility, reducing carbon.
The company also uses freight trains for transport, wherever possible, removing goods lorries from the roads.
All these actions help address a major criticism of glass’ sustainability, that it is heavier than alternatives.
“Encirc 360 have started working on all sorts of things like where’s their energy source going to come from in the future. They’ve also got very good EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] practice,” says Jolly.
“They work with women in engineering and science – they had a campaign called ‘Women with bottle’ which I love – it’s a fantastic strapline because they work with bottles. Out of that, they’ve got a lot of female expertise.
“Two of their managers for their furnaces – the people actually supervising the work, workers and the furnaces themselves – are young female graduate engineers in their 20s. This is quite phenomenally different from the rest of the industry.”
But it’s not just a case of equity or fairness, diversity is important for all businesses and sectors, especially those areas where change and new ideas are needed.
“We need more engineers, and what we need is more diverse engineers. So generally speaking, if you look through these foundation sectors you’ll see that it’s mainly managed and developed and directed by white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant men.
“If you’re going to solve a global challenge, you need a diversity of ideas. We need different disciplines and different ways of thinking. We need diversity and neurodiversity. You can’t solve entrenched problems with the same thinking.”
Cranfield has been working on programmes to encourage more women into foundational industries and has developed a series of podcasts on improving diversity in these sectors.
The potential of a custodianship model
One of the new ways of thinking about sustainable materials might be around ownership.
“I don’t think we value the materials we have in society enough. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about materials passporting so if you dig something up out of the ground, it has a passport,” Jolly says.
“It has an identity which then gets transferred as it goes through different ownerships. And actually, this comes back to the economics, because how do you transfer the value?
“The current economics is that you sell it on. What we should be doing is transferring the custodianship and actually selling the value, or rather leasing the value so the materials themselves have a value throughout their whole life.
“When the product, or whatever it is that you’ve used it for, comes to the end of this life, it still has value. It can be used as the raw material for another product, or the same product, and it can be used or repurposed.”
A custodianship model would also change the impetus from selling increasing numbers of short-lived products to building longer-lasting products that can be repaired out of your materials.
“Whatever you make from the material, you’ve got to make it last longer, whatever it does; whether that’s by repairing it, maintaining it, or making sure that lasts for as long as possible.
“For example, if we made everything last 50% longer we wouldn’t have to dig up 50% as much material.
“If we want to get to net zero we need to cut our materials production globally by 50%, which means, in the West, we need to cut our materials production by even more.
“50% is a huge amount, and the easiest way of doing that is to make things last longer.
“We’ve got to get everybody on board with this idea of making the life of a product longer. By making the materials use longer, they become a more sustainable material.”
How can we quit our addiction to “stuff”?
Reducing demand, and our need for “stuff”, is the elephant in the room.
Yes, we also have to look at alternative materials and our economic structures.
It’s interesting that many of the solutions around reducing demand such as repair and re-use, in the global north, involve community building.
Repair centres, libraries of things, community larders and allotments all involve people coming together.
While tackling waste these projects are also addressing social problems like loneliness, isolation, and poverty. Perhaps replacing “stuff” with “connection” is the way to go.
