Plastics

Typically low cost, the wide varieties of plastics cover just about any application you can think of. Used in living hinges and bottle tops to crystal clear shatter-proof screens, plastics have become a low cost and lighter weight alternative to metals, glass and wood in the last 60 years.

Whilst the market for bio-plastics is increasing, the vast majority of plastic is derived from fossil fuels, with about 7% of all petroleum converted into plastics.

General perception
Since the release of Blue Planet II there has been no turning back for plastic. Especially when combined with the phrase ‘single use’ the general perception of plastic is that it is one of the major contributors to the current climate crisis.

Silicone

Silicone is a synthetic elastomer, also called silicone rubber.

Silicone vs Silicon

People mistakenly believe that silicone is made from a renewable material; sand. In fact it’s silicon, the stuff used to make computer chips [think Silicon Valley], that comes from sand. Silicon is extracted from mined quartz sand or silica which is combined with carbon dioxide and heated to 2000C, before going through a refining process. 

At this point the silicon is mixed with a fossil fuel derived hydrocarbon called methyl chloride and goes through a complex distillation process to get polydimethylsiloxane which is then polymerized to get silicone. 

So whilst sand is technically a raw material of silicone, you can’t escape the part made from fossil fuels.

Metals

Metals are extracted from mined quarry rock and then refined to remove impurities. The refinement process varies from metal to metal. Some like iron are smelted; heated to high temperatures along with a reducing agent. Others require electrolytic or chemical refining. Extracting metals is very energy intensive, however once extracted, they are relatively easy to recycle. Using recycled content and making considerations for re-capture at the end of life are the best ways of minimising the impact of the metal components in your product.

Glass

Glass is made by heating quartz sand (yep the same stuff used to make silicone) mixed with ground recycled glass, sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate and heated to 1700 degrees C. 

To make borosillicate glass, a tougher form of glass best known for its use in Pyrex jugs, boron oxide is also added.

Once the molten glass is formed, it can be blown, molded or made into flat sheets.

Wood

The two general wood categories are soft wood and hard wood. Softwood timber comes from coniferous trees, or simply put ‘trees with cones’. Whereas hardwood timber is obtained from deciduous tree’s which lose their leaves annually.

We use over 50 million tonnes of wood in the UK each year, over 80% of which we import. Around three quarters of this is softwood and over half of it is used for paper and board based materials. As industrial designers, we don’t often use a lot of wood, but it’s easy to forget its use in packaging.

An FSC Chain of Custody (CoC) certification is the main thing to ask for when working with wood products as there is still illegal trade of unsustainable woods. 

Textiles

A T-shirt on average is worn 7 times before being discarded. Europeans on average use nearly 26 kilos of textiles per year and discard about 11 kilos of them every year. While some used clothes are exported, 87% of them end up in landfills or are incinerated.

So much of a product's impact is so out of sight, it stays out of mind, and the textile industry is one of the worst offenders. After packaging, the textiles industry is the second biggest creator of plastic waste, responsible for 42 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2015, and with the seemingly relentless growth in fast fashion you bet it’s gone up since then. 

A huge amount of waste is also produced during the processing and manufacture of textiles. A single cotton T-shirt for example requires 2,700 litres of water, enough for someone to drink 8 glasses a day for 3 and a half years, and a lot of this water cannot be reused due to the dies and chemicals used in the process.

An excellent source of further reading about the textile industry as a whole can be found here, or this article summarises the facts really well.