Material minimisation drives Dyson’s manufacturing ethos.

Dyson Appliances finds its sustainability savings are self-perpetuating, so it’s now trialling a take-back scheme to reccyle other vacuum manufacturer’s products. By Garth Lamb.

Vacuum-maker Dyson Appliances believes “environmental responsibilty should always be part of the engineering process,” and it isn’t waiting for local regulation to force it into action on product stewardship either, launching a take-back program allowing customers who purchase a new Dyson vacuum to recycle their old machine, whatever the brand.

Managing director of south-east Asian operations, Ross Cameron, said waste was an obvious focal point when management sat down two years ago to discuss sustainability and decided “we have to do more internally”. It began separating waste streams at its manufacturing facilities, “and there’s virtually nothing we produce here now that goes into landfill, except the odd sandwich and apple core”.

“It’s amazing when you start doing it [working on sustainability], it seems like a pain in the butt, but now it’s becoming the accepted norm here… And now that it’s working internally, we thought ‘what about all the machines [we sell]’.”

First, it established a recyling program for customers returning old Dysons, “but we wanted to take it to the next step… by opening this program to all machines”, at least during an initial two-month promotion and evaluation period that started in February.

Returned units will be broken down, with the various components sent to “reputable third-party recyclers”. Dyson will get a return on some valuable parts – such as metals – and pay to dispose of lower value material, including plastics.

Headquartered in the UK, Dyson is used to EU directives around product stewardship and the reycling of electronic items, which have cut the volume of e-waste sent to landfill to about 15 per cent. Given some 95 per cent of Australian e-waste is landfilled, Cameron concludes “we’re miles behind the Europeans, and we’ve got a lot of work to do”.

Dyson’s take-back program doesn’t rely on its third-party retailers – Cameron said their job is to showcase and sell products, “and I believe it’s our job, once they’re sold, to look after them”.

“It may cost us $20 [per unit returned] but, at the end of the day, we believe that this is the way things have got to go... we’ve got limited resources and we’ve just got to do it.”

Suck the costs up
Considered a premium product, the key selling point for Dyson vaccums is quality, not price. This might give it more room to manouevre when it comes to programs such as the take-back offer, but Cameron argues all manufacturers – regardless of their price point – should “be thinking along these lines,” and cost shouldn’t be an excuse for not taking responsibilty for products.

Many manufacturers, such as Fuji Xerox, that have also gone down the take-back path have made design changes allowing them to more easily recover materials at the end-of-life, but Cameron said designing for recyclability isn’t a major focus for Dyson. Instead, it looks for ways to “find the minimal amount of material we can put in” – there are, after all, good reasons why ‘avoid’ tops the waste heirachy.

“We believe we can make a better product if we start to design things to use a lot less materials,” he said.

The company isn’t only chasing marginal improvments on existing designs. Some 10 years ago it started looking at digital motor design, which Cameron claims is “step change technology” for the industry.

Traditional motors are based on carbon brushes that wear out after about 1,000 hours and are inefficient because they can only spin up to about 38,000rpm, “otherwise they fly to pieces”. While their production has become cheaper and more efficient over the years, the actual technology itself is “basically the same as they were using in the late 1800s”.

Dyson’s latest hand-held vacuums and AirBlade hand dryers now use electronically controlled digital motors, a completely different design that works better, lasts longer and uses less materials to produce.

“The motor in there is half the size, half the weight, [has] twice the output and is 80 per cent more efficient,” said Cameron, partly because they can run speeds of up to 100,000rpm.

According to Cameron, such innovation comes about through a constant focus on being smarter in the manufacturing process, and “once you go down this track, the savings just continue to roll on”.