April 3, 2024
This assignment asked us to select a single product; pretending that we are working for that company to optimize its material potential using one or more of the four Resource Loops Strategies (Narrow, Close, Slow, Regenerate), helping the company to reduce their environmental impact and the financial burden of their products ever being discarded.
The project deliverable was in the form of a stop-motion animation video; mine is below. I chose to tackle colored pencils, as the product is something that I use consistently and is important to many people in my field. The full, unedited script is below the video, as I had to cut it down for time.
Overall, I think the message and project concepts came through successfully. There are still technicalities of the specific product optimization to consider, such as material waste through sharpening and effectiveness of natural pigments. However, material-wise, I’m proud of the work. As for the animation, when it comes time to redo and take critiques into consideration, I will probably attempt a different kind of animation, such as a whiteboard animation. I found that I lacked visuals throughout the video, and the video quality could also be better. It would also be beneficial for me to make a slightly longer animation the second time around in order to fit all the information in.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1isf85HMsL9aTJjzIo_8rT9E5EtWq61Hr/view?usp=sharing
3-4 minute stop-motion animation SCRIPT on EPR Tagging – Colored Pencils
[Intro and EPR information, circular economy]
I came up with a new design for colored pencils after taking EPR into account. EPR stands for Extended Producer Responsibility. In other words, it’s a regulation designed to ensure that producers of any kind of product are held accountable for all life cycle stages, meaning how it impacts the environment during the products’ end-of-life, whether through disposal or second-life uses. This enables producers to design a product that fits into a circular economy, a sustainable system where materials are constantly being circulated. There are four resource loops that, when utilized, can help the shift from a linear economy to a circular economy.
[Introduce product, it’s composition, & problem]
These are standard colored pencils. They are composed of wood, binders, such as resins or waxes, pigments, glue, varnish, and water. The production of colored pencils consists of the outer casing, which is stripped and dried lumber, enclosing the core lead of the pencil, which is a mixture of the pigment, binders, and water, sealed together with some glue, dipped in varnish, and occasionally heat stamped with a logo and/or name of the colored pencil. Colored pencils have millions of users, Crayola produces almost 12 million colored pencils a day, and the consumer base isn’t getting any smaller, from toddlers to professional artists.
However, a problem with this product’s lifespan is that there comes a point when no one is patient enough to tediously sharpen a short pencil down to its last leg. Sure, there are tools to help with this, such as pencil extenders, for example, but eventually, these tiny stubs get thrown in the trash, and colored pencils are near impossible to recycle because of how intertwined the components are.
[Explain resource loop recommendation & identify the aligned resource loop]
My recommendation for designing with regards to sustainability and the EPR policy emphasizes three resource loops: a Slowing, Narrowing, and a Regenerating Resource Loop. Here is the new product.
First, tackling the exterior. The size of the pencil is standard, but I took away the wood casing in order to have more product, being the colored pencil lead, in the same size, so consumers can use the product for a longer period of time. This completely takes away the use of wood, saving hundreds of trees that are harvested every day for pencil production. However, there is still an exterior paper to help with grip as well as minimizing the amount of color residue when handling the pencil. This paper is made out of plantable seed paper, a biodegradable paper made from post-consumer materials embedded with seeds for various wildflowers, herbs, or vegetables. So, when you tear away the paper as the pencil gets shorter, or when you are done with the pencil, you can plant the paper in soil which will later biodegrade and the seeds will germinate, producing new life.
As for the color part of the pencil, regular colored pencil manufacturers have secret processes and binder recipes, so while they aren’t necessarily toxic for the environment, we do know that they endure a lot of chemical processing. This new core is made of natural pigments and binders. Flowers and fruits give off a lot of natural pigment, and rocks and minerals are known to also have different color properties, which can then be extracted and mixed with natural binders, such as coconut oil, dried fruits, and even honey. Because of how natural these pencils are, when a consumer can’t sharpen them anymore or they’ve become too small to use, they can naturally decompose in the ground, giving back nutrients from the resources they were extracted from. Coconut oil has also been proved to help plants in low temperatures because of its abundance of Vitamin E.
[Describe benefit of the recommendation]
Overall, these new and natural colored pencils both save resources such as wood, and also give back to the environment through a regenerative second-life. Not to mention that they prolong the initial life, benefiting the consumer in getting their money’s worth.
Thanks for watching!