Some Disassembly Required
With Think, Steelcase creates a comprehensive environmental strategy
that reconfigures all aspects of the manufacturing process—from the
chair’s initial conception to its eventual disassembly.
By Julie Taraska
July 2004
Sometimes how something comes apart is more important than how it comes
together. This was the case two years ago when Steelcase began
developing the brief for its new Think chair. The company wanted an
elegant, ergonomic, and environmentally sustainable midpriced
($600–$1,200) contract chair. And so
Steelcase began at the end—consulting its network of recyclers.
“We asked them, ‘Realistically what would you recycle from a
chair?’” says Ken Tameling, head of marketing for seating at
Steelcase. “They said, ‘Well, if I could take a common hand
tool and get a lot of materials from the chair in five minutes, then
I’d do it. But if it takes longer than that, forget it.’”
From that response, Think’s ethos was shaped. The chair, which will
be available for order this month, is made to be disassembled so that
after its useful life components can be easily accessed, sorted, and
returned to the raw-materials stream. To make this cradle-to-cradle
strategy truly work, Steelcase had to ensure that the goal was supported
by all steps in Think’s life cycle—from the chair’s
design, engineering, and materials to its production, transport, and
reuse. It had to rethink its manufacturing process and create a new
program to help customers determine the most responsible way to dispose
of their chairs and assist them in accomplishing that.
Other companies may have redesigned their products for environmental
benefit, using recycled content, altering production techniques, or
even—like BMW and appliance manufacturer
Matsushita—experimenting with take-back policies. But nothing yet
has approached Think’s carefully plotted-out sustainability
strategy.
Engineering + Design
“It was first about the reduction of physical and visual
weight,” says Glen Oliver Löw, the chair’s principal
designer. For Löw, whose long career includes designs for
Gebrüder Thonet, Kartell, and Vitra, the transparency of the
chair—in its look, elements, and assembly—became a driving
force. “I wanted everything to be visible,” he says,
“with all the components showing their function clearly to the
user.”
During design development Löw conferred closely with Kurt Heidmann,
Steelcase’s chief engineer. After conducting a raft of
research—including tension and thermal studies, computer and
physical modeling, video ethnography, and hands-on
experimentation—Heidmann and his team concluded that Think should
be a weight-activated, ergonomically correct chair, which users would
find, in Löw’s words, “as intuitive as sitting on a
beach.” To achieve this balance between ease and science, the
engineers developed a number of new mechanisms: Your Profile, a parallel
set of stainless-steel flexors threaded throughout the chair’s back
and seat panels; Your Preference, a back selector that offers a choice
between three reclining positions; and Your Power, a u-shaped mechanism
that allows for fluid, springy motion of the back frame and seat.
Life-Cycle Analysis
Niki Bey, a consultant at the Institute for Product Development in
Copenhagen, used the Environmental Design of Industrial Products (EDIP)
methodology to tabulate Think’s cumulative effect on the
environment throughout its lifecycle. Bey focused on key environmental
impacts like smog, global warming, and acidification, taking into
account such elements as the location of Think’s suppliers in
relation to the manufacturing facilities, and the amount and types of
energy used to create the chair’s materials. With Wolfgang Wimmer,
from the Technical University of Vienna, he summarized the results in an
Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), which will be publicly
available later this year.
To complement Bey’s tabulations, Steelcase also looked at the
impact of the 14 raw materials used in Think. Utilizing the
Cradle-to-Cradle Protocol, a proprietary method developed by MBDC, Jay
Bolus evaluated seven of the chair’s higher-volume substances,
assigning each to one of four categories: green (little or no risk to
humans and the environment), yellow (low-to-moderate risk), orange (no
indication of risk, but further data needed), and red (high risk). Only
green and yellow materials were used in the chair. Bolus and Bey’s
work ensured that Think met the requirements for Japan’s Green
Label, France’s NF Environment Label, and the United States’
Greenguard Certification.
Manufacturing + Transportation
Companies often produce a product on one side of the world and then ship
it to another; this approach may even save money, but it wastes fossil
fuels and adds to air pollution. For Think, Steelcase has centralized
its manufacturing process, minimizing the distance between the
company’s factories, suppliers, and customers. The chair’s 12
subassemblies are supplied by eight fabricators, each of which is
located as close as possible to one of Steelcase’s manufacturing
plants. These facilities have been placed to serve specific sections of
the global market: the Grand Rapids, Michigan, plant will fulfill orders
in North and South America; the Sarrebourg, France, factory will serve
Europe and Africa; and the Kuala Lumpur facility (to open May 2005) will
provide for the Asian and Australian markets.
Shipping
Steelcase will ship Think in plastic wrap rather than in cardboard
containers, and is encouraging its suppliers to transfer parts to and
from the company in reusable totes.
The chair can also be sent fully disassembled so that more will fit into
each delivery truck or partially assembled in boxes that do not contain
dye, eliminating the environmental damage done by ink.
Use, Reuse, + End of Life
Think is calculated to have a 20-year life expectancy, although that
estimation is the absolute minimum because chairs often find second and
even third lives in homes, universities, and nonprofits. For that
reason, with Think, Steelcase is debuting the “Steelcase
environmental partnership,” a combination take-back and brokerage
scheme that taps into a nexus of suppliers, charities, and recyclers in
the United States and Europe. Intended to help the company better serve
its customers, as well as to keep Steelcase products out of the
landfill, the process starts with customers answering a series of
questions about the age, condition, amount, and location of the
furniture involved, as well as what they’d like to accomplish with
the items. Based on those answers, Steelcase suggests one or more of
four scenarios: refurbish the chair, sell it to a third party, donate it
to a charity, or recycle its component parts. |
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Ninety-nine percent recyclable, the Think chair can be disassembled in
five minutes using common hand tools. The chair’s parts are
separable rather than fused to increase the likelihood that they will be
recycled at the end of its life. |
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Threaded through Think’s back and seat panels is a set of flexors
that expand and contract with the user’s movement. Like the muscles
along one’s spine, which hold the vertebrae in place, each flexor
works individually and has its own separate limits; together they form a
coherent surface that gently pushes the back into an ergonomically
correct shape. |
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Heidmann struggled with a way to affix the back and seat frames while
allowing for free movement of each. His “aha!” moment came
while attending a lecture by biologist Robert Full, who suggested that
to create more natural motion in robots springs should be used rather
than joints or limbs. Heidmann applied the idea to Think, replacing the
previous machinery with a single bouncy u-shaped mechanism.
Although Think is weight-activated, its engineers still had to account
for user physiology, work styles, and personal preferences. So the team
added the chair’s single adjustment knob, Your Preference, which
offers a choice between three reclining positions. |
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Click
here to download a PDF version of the Manufacturing +
Transportation map. |
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Think is designed for dissassembly: these stills from a video, which
will be posted on the Steelcase Web site, show just how easy it is to
take apart the chair and sort its pieces. “A lot of designers and
manufacturers don’t take dissasembly into account when they make
their products,” says MBDC’s Bolus. “They pick the right
materials, but then they put them together in a way that makes it
difficult to get those materials back and reuse them.”
Courtesy Steelcase |
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