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Afterlife: An Essential Guide To Design For Disassembly, by Alex Diener
I never thought about it, but its only make sens.
The auto-motor industry should implement this concept in the engine design.
Amit.
Check out mine: http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_file.asp?from_url=true&portfolio_id=3667218&individual_id=126772
Almost two years and still a prototype. I even created a strategy for a full life support of this design.
... and recycling ... I don't think its really "green" :)
Short term thinking is expensive; whereas long term thinking amortizes cost and puts more money into your pocket. If the parts are going to be designed, shouldn't they be designed well?
DFD may not be appropriate for everything, but it's principles can improve most products.
You're correct, design itself will not change the world.
People with open-minds change the world.
This guide is not an opinion piece on green design (or global warming), but rather recommendations to assist designers and engineers in changing the product development processes with the goal of reducing materials, labor, and improving product longevity.
I'm making changes in the way I design products because I'm sick of mediocrity. Are you?
Recycling this recycling that, design will not change the world, as one clever person said, if you want to make the change stop talking about it and make the change. Green this green that, global warming is just loads of ........
http://www.activedisassembly.com/guidelines/ADR_050202_DFD-guidelines.pdf
ABS plastic is used extensively in consumer products and industry, such as housings for electronics and appliances. TVs, monitors, DVD players, blenders, telephones, you name it: nearly all large rigid plastic molded household items are ABS. It has a large recycling industry, with computers and electronics being a big focus in recent years.
PLA (poly-lactic acid) is a newly-popular plastic being touted as biodegradable or compostable. While it won't break down in your garden, it can be composted in an industrial process. Many street food vendors in Portland Oregon provide PLA spoons and forks, and have compost collection bins for food scraps, paper plates, and PLA utensils next to the garbage bin.
Also, bhabicht, as they point out in Cradle to Cradle, aluminum cans aren't really that great to recycle. The tops, and I believe the bottoms, of soda cans are made from a different alloy than the rest of the can. So when they're melted down together, as is usually the case, they create an inferior alloy that can't be used for either part of a can again.
guidelines that has been around for almost two decades. Before such DfD guidelines are adopted, it is important to know some of their practical and economic limitations.
A challenging part for designers is estimating the time required or manual disassembly, human identification of materials and human movement to the correct "bin". In some cases this can happen quickly; in other casers is very time consuming. In the latter cases, the cost of the labor is much greater than the economic value of the materials and the process is not
economically viable.
There is a weight limit on parts to which such DfD rules apply - usually around 5 grams for plastics - more or less. Certainly less for precious metals - and more for commodity plastics. This is a crucial point that designers often misunderstand and that needs to be included in such lists of DfD guidelines.
Further, increasingly, once valuable and toxic materials have been removed from an assembly using labor intensive methods, the remaining assembly is mechanically shred and machines sort the material fragments into respective streams, somewhat like mining processes. This is increasingly occurring in Europe under the WEEE.
thank you,
Philip White
My favorite product/container made for disassembly is the Smints' container (http://www.smint.com/). It's only two pieces, yet it works so well.
Also, one that I have love since the 80's is the Pop Swatch (similar to the watch above).