"IT'S NOT ABOUT WASTE" : Why you don’t have a waste problem, but a design one

Most businesses invest heavily in costly and ineffective strategies to manage waste after it has already been created.

Why is your current recycling or disposal strategy likely a waste of resources?

Because waste is not an inevitable part of operations; it is a flaw in how your products and processes were designed.

Up to 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined during the initial design phase.

If you focus only on downstream impacts like recycling or incineration, you are merely treating symptoms while ignoring the root cause.

Waste represents a massive loss of financial value for your company, exemplified by the $62 billion in unrecovered natural resources found in e-waste in 2022 alone

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This blog post is derived from the Gartner report titled "Design Out Waste to Save Costs and Achieve Sustainability Goals," published on 21 January 2025 by Anne Michelle Avolio, John Blake, and Tom Jepsen.
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Here are the main recommandations

1. How to adopt a proactive waste assessment :

• Evaluate the financial cost of raw materials and resource inputs lost during your production process.

• Measure the effectiveness of your current controls by calculating the actual materials saved over time.

• Conduct a gap analysis to identify where your current product portfolio fails to meet sustainability objectives.

• Assess the financial implications of upcoming regulations, such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)

2. Moving from reactive symptoms to upstream innovation :

How did one company slash its logistics and packaging spend by 43% just by changing its boxes?

Thermo King achieved this by redesigning its packaging from disposable wood to reusable steel and plastic.

Upstream innovation means rethinking products and processes to eliminate waste at the source.

This proactive approach allows you to optimize costs and manage resource constraints more effectively.

For example, Cisco has committed to incorporating circular design principles into 100% of its new products and packaging by 2025.

3. How to implement circular design :

• Adopt the "5 R’s" for every new product launch: ensure it is recyclable, refillable, reusable, recycled, or recoverable.

• Standardize and modularize components to make repair and disassembly easier for the end user.

• Use a project scorecard to quantify how well your R&D projects align with waste and carbon reduction goals.

• Embed sustainable criteria into your operational processes through stage-gate review steps to stop wasteful designs early.

4. Leading the transformation through governance and culture :

How can you ensure these design principles actually drive long-term profit?

Success requires a cross-functional team that bridges the gap between R&D, engineering, supply chain, and production.

This team should identify optimization opportunities during the earliest phases of innovation, where intervention costs the least.

Strong governance ensures that your product portfolio remains dynamic and responsive to evolving compliance requirements.

You should also look beyond your own walls: ecosystem partnerships can amplify your impact through shared resources and collective innovation.

5. Checklist for driving organizational change:

• Establish a cross-functional team dedicated to resource optimization and waste elimination.

• Train your engineering and production teams on sustainability by design to make it part of daily decision-making.

• Set measurable goals to track the integration of sustainability criteria across the entire product life cycle.

• Join sector-wide collaborations to pool investments in sustainable waste practices and infrastructure

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