Three R's in Green

I wrote an article for this months issue of segdDESIG magazine that focused on the 3 R's in Green - Reduce, Re-Use and Recycle.  These three topics really cover the gammit related to environmental consciousness and touch on everything from landfill contribution to value engineering to modularity.

Many of the examples sited in the article have been discussed on this blog in the past.  Breaking things up in these three topics - Reduce, Re-Use and Recycle proves to be an easy and fun way to discuss environmental consciousness related to recycling and material waste.

Reduce - design and build for better material yield.  Begin with the end in mind and allow for more possibilities at the end of a products life. 

Re-Use - design with life cycle in mind - if a system needs to be in place for X amount of years and the reality is that components will change, build so the core can continually be Re-Used.  Can a product be disassembled allowing components to be re-used for other projects?

Recycle - sounds like the easy one but it's not.  Very little of what we build gets recycled because of the nature of the products we make, how they're made and how they're installed.

Maybe Recycle is the third R because if the other two R's are done, recycling what's left won't be so hard.