One of the things about growing up in the Northwest in the 80s and 90s is that you are indoctrinated into a lifestyle that makes you very careful about littering. Bestowed with the virtues of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” I’ve felt genuine guilt whenever I cannot find a recycle bin in which to drop a discarded plastic bottle. So when visiting my family’s cabin in remote Teton Valley, Idaho a couple years back, I had an amazing realization about the true nature of waste disposal.

There is no garbage service in the valley. Most residents have to collect and haul their own garbage to the county landfill located South of the town of Driggs. At the end of a visit to the cabin with my family, I rode out to the landfill one day with my parents to help drop off some garbage.

The landfill was simply a large depression carved into a field off the highway, dirt walls held back by a bulldozer. Trash is piled into a heap, to be eventually buried under a couple feet of dirt by heavy machinery. Recycling service for metal and glass only. We drive in, the car is weighed, drive up to the pile, get out and throw our garbage onto the heap. A plastic bottle I drank from the day before rattled across the ground. I wondered if I should pick it up, and realized it was pointless. This was it. This field is what was at the bottom of the trash can.

We got back in the car, paid a few dollars, and left. 

As innocuous as this experience may seem, I left with a very strong impression that we had proverbially swept our trash under the rug. We just put it out there in that field and they bury it? 

Looking at the things around me in the landfill, a lot of the things were designed: empty bottles of consumables, outdated consumer electronics, old furniture, shredded clothes. Small armies of designers, engineers and manufacturers had spent their time creating these things, modeling bottles in Rhino, debating color choices in Illustrator, setting up manufacturing, distribution and sales of these things. People who, just like me, probably loved the creative challenge to do what they do.

Whether a product’s life span is one day, one year, or one thousand, eventually the product will be discarded, no matter if it’s mundane or precious.  

Working in the product design field, it can be difficult to face this realization. Which means that getting in touch with the difficult reality of your product’s end-of-life (in consumer speak, this means trash disposal) makes you much more aware of your impact on the environment.

As product designers (broadly speaking), we are successful if our work has provided some genuine service and value as a tool for the user during its useful life. Minimizing the environmental impact of our work is simply another design challenge to be solved. And we even know how to do this, even if it is sometimes expensive today: design for disassembly, use of recycled and recyclable components, eliminate the use of toxic materials, minimize power consumption, etc.

As product design continues to evolve into the more holistic concept of Experience Design, we will have more opportunities to embrace these these design challenges. 

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, try to experience the landfill at the bottom of the trash can for yourself.