Designing from the dumpster: experiences of developing products using discards

This article presents results from the Waste to Design (W2D) project, that analysed six product development theses projects done to make use of specific waste materials. The W2D project investigated what challenges are faced when designing with waste and how they could be addressed. It was found that there is a need for a pre-process, where: material properties are analysed, several possible application areas are suggested and later screened to determine one product type to develop. The main challenge observed was the lack of reliable material property data for the discarded materials, which hindered well informed screening. Understanding the processes needed for designing with waste is a first step in order to facilitate this work in the future.