Edition #10 - The Hidden Cost of Making Things, and How to Design for a Lasting Future

When people talk about sustainable product design, they are usually referring to environmental sustainability, rather than economic, or social sustainability. More specifically, the sustainability of the ecosystems that products interact with and depend on for their creation. This includes aspects such as the depletion of natural resources, pollution, climate change and the long-term health of air, water, soil, and biodiversity.

To fully understand a product's sustainability, a business must look beyond any single feature or use-phase and consider the products entire lifecycle, including how it interacts with and affects the broader ecosystem.
Often, the word sustainability is immediately associated with carbon emissions. But the concept is, of course, much broader. At its core, something is unsustainable if it cannot continue indefinitely. Unsustainability typically arises when we:

• Deplete a resource: because eventually, it runs out, or becomes increasingly costly or damaging to access,
• Accumulate or concentrate something:  to the point that it becomes toxic or harmful.

These activities ultimately lead to environmental degradation, either directly (e.g. pollution and toxicity) or indirectly (e.g. through greenhouse gas emissions or the social or ecological impacts of resource scarcity or destructive extraction).
Most products manufactured today contribute to one or both of these concepts to varying degrees. Manufacturing, by its nature, consumes resources, concentrates substances, and often results in products that cannot be returned to their original material states, so are fundamentally changing the eco system.

Sustainability is complex. Unlike product safety, which focuses on individual harm, sustainability considers planetary and systemic impacts. It's grounded in global-scale risks: climate change, declining fossil fuels, mineral scarcity, and localised environmental degradation. These risks may be harder to visualise, but they will eventually affect your business.

A linear economy, which consists of extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal, assumes unlimited resources and an unlimited ability to meet rising energy demands. Neither assumption holds.

Resource Depletion
Some of the most pressing environmental consequences come from the depletion of natural resources that entire ecosystems depend on. When these resources are used faster than they can regenerate, or when natural systems are disrupted, the resulting degradation can be severe and long-lasting.

For example, deforestation reduces biodiversity, disrupts water cycles, causes soil erosion, and limits carbon absorption, accelerating environmental degradation. In agriculture, intensive farming depletes soil fertility, leading to erosion, lower yields, and greater reliance on fertilisers that can harm waterways. Overfishing depletes stocks faster than they can recover, disrupting marine food webs and threatening ocean biodiversity.

When natural systems are pushed beyond their limits, the result is environmental degradation. Designing products and systems that reduce pressure on these resources, or that actively support regeneration, will be key to creating a truly sustainable future.

While many forms of depletion, such as soil degradation or deforestation, have direct ecological impacts, other forms create systemic risks that are just as urgent.

The European Commission, along with other governments globally, maintains a list of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs). These materials are essential to economic development but face serious risks due to geological scarcity or highly concentrated and fragile supply chains. Examples include tellurium, used in thin-film solar panels, and phosphorus, which is vital for industrial agriculture. Both are non-renewable and often sourced in ways that pose environmental and geopolitical risks.

Although the depletion of CRMs may not always lead to direct ecosystem collapse, it often results in extraction practices with significant environmental consequences. These include water pollution, habitat destruction, and substantial carbon emissions. In regions such as the Western Sahara, phosphorus mining has contributed to geopolitical tension and conflict, showing how resource scarcity can also create social instability.

The growing dependence on CRMs in electronics and clean energy technologies, combined with low recycling rates and linear product lifecycles, is worsening both environmental and social unsustainability. In 2022 alone, 62 million metric tonnes of electronic waste were generated (UNITAR et al., 2024). Much of this ends up in landfills or is exported to countries with limited environmental protections.

This highlights a broader truth. Unsustainable resource use, whether biological or mineral, has wide-reaching consequences. Depleting any critical resource puts pressure on the systems that support life, social stability, and economic resilience.

Our dependence on energy must also be viewed as a depletion issue. Fossil fuels, although still central to global energy systems, are finite and increasingly difficult and energy-intensive to extract. As conventional oil and gas sources decline, the world is relying more on unconventional reserves such as tar sands or deepwater drilling. These options carry greater environmental costs and lower energy returns.

At the same time, renewable energy, while essential to reducing emissions, has its own limitations. These include challenges related to storage, material requirements, and energy intermittency. Even with expanding capacity, renewable energy cannot keep up with unchecked consumption without creating pressure elsewhere in the system.

Energy, whether fossil-based or renewable, comes with environmental costs. From extraction and manufacturing through to transportation and end-of-life processing. Every stage of a product’s life requires energy. If current trends continue, we will eventually reach a limit, not only in fossil fuel availability but also in our capacity to build and maintain energy systems that meet demand.

For this reason, ensuring your business is designing products for lower overall energy demand is essential.
Thinking about resource depletion isn’t just about reducing harm. It’s about building a business that can thrive no matter how the world changes. When you understand what your products consume and the systems they depend on, you can make smarter design choices, strengthen supply resilience, and unlock opportunities your competitors might overlook. In the next newsletter, we’ll explore the other side of the sustainability challenge: what happens when products and processes create harmful build-up in our environment, and how you can turn that knowledge into an advantage.

Reference: UNITAR et al. (2024) Global E-waste Monitor 2024: Electronic Waste Rising Five Times Faster than Documented E-waste Recycling. Bonn, Germany. Available at: https://unitar.org/about/news-stories/press/global-e-waste-monitor-2024-electronic-waste-rising-five-times-faster-documented-e-waste-recycling (Accessed: 17 July 2025).