Materials as a service

These days, you don’t need to own a car to go for a ride: plenty of companies, from Uber to Zipcar, will sell you the mobility you need as a service. While this model benefits us as consumers for the flexibility it offers, it also benefits the planet by helping us make more efficient use of physical resources.

But what if the same idea was applied to the materials and components used to make the car? Perhaps, instead of buying steel to make the car, the manufacturer would only pay to use the steel for as long as the car was on the road. The same might be true of the rubber in the tyres and the fabric on the seats.

Dr Marco Aurisicchio and Dr Anouk Zeeuw van der Laan in the Dyson School of Design Engineering believe this paradigm shift could be key to achieving the transition to a sustainable society. They have been working on the concept for the past few years, discussing case studies with industry partners, and collecting information with them on what it would take to make the idea a reality. “It’s a radically different way of thinking about how we organise our economy and, fundamentally, the meaning of ownership,” Dr Aurisicchio says. “It would shift us towards a different way of thinking about what we use.”

A business model in which you pay to use something rather than to own it is called an access-based model. Car leasing and ride-sharing are the most familiar examples of products as a service in the business-to-consumer area, while in the business-to-business world it is common to lease items such as heavy machinery or office equipment and furniture. Working this way already has environmental advantages, since incentives to reduce consumption and return goods for reuse and recycling are built in.

But these examples only involve finished products. Dr Aurisicchio is interested in extending the approach to the materials and components that go into them. It’s an idea that he explored last year in a blog for the World Economic Forum, written in collaboration with Dr Graham Aid and Lars Nybom of European environmental services and recycling company Ragn-Sells, with whom Dr Aurisicchio and Dr Zeeuw van der Laan have been collaborating on case studies.

“For example, a supplier might lease stainless steel sheets to a car manufacturer, to form the tubes for a chassis,” Dr Aurisicchio explains. “Rather than owning the sheets, the car manufacturer would be charged to access the volume of material transformed into car chassis for an agreed period of time. At the end of this period, the car would be taken apart to allow the material supplier to retrieve the components and recycle the materials.”

Access all areas

There are many areas of the economy where access-based business models might be applied to semi-finished goods in a material-service system.

Food grade plastics such as PET could be leased to packaging manufacturers for use in bottles and containers, if systems are put in place to recover them from consumers.

Stainless steel sheets could be leased to a car manufacturer to form the tubes that make up the chassis.

Thermoplastic polyurethane could be leased to footwear manufacturers for use in running shoes if designs were adjusted to make the material easier to recover.

Aluminium alloys used to make printing plates could be leased and recovered after each print run.

Materials needed to make electrodes could leased to the producers of batteries for electric vehicles then recovered at the end of the batteries lives.

Flocculants and precipitation agents could be leased to waste water treatment companies, then recovered from the sludge after incineration.

Steel could be leased to a manufacturer of food containers, such as ice cream cups, which would in turn be leased to ice cream suppliers.

Talking access with industry

While the idea of an access-based business model is not alien to industry, shifting to materials as a service still requires a leap of faith. “As a concept it is still quite theoretical, and there is very little application in the real world,” says Dr Zeeuw van der Laan. “We need to sit with companies, build case studies, do the calculations, and go thoroughly into how the dynamics might change and what the profits might be.”

Ragn-Sells is an early adopter of this approach, but the researchers have also talked with companies in the plastics and consumer goods sectors. It’s only natural that such companies are wary.

“They see a lot of risks, unknowns and uncertainties in these business models, and that makes sense: there is very little evidence of these types of business model being successful,” Dr Zeeuw van der Laan explains. “It’s the same in any sustainability or circular economy innovation, and the businesses models that come with it. Businesses need to see evidence from other businesses before they are willing to take the plunge.”

Traceability is one of the most common areas of concern for companies. “There are often questions around how they are going to monitor what happens to their materials and where they are going,” she says. “There are lots of technologies and innovations that are emerging that could address that uncertainty, but at the same time they are not widely rolled out yet.”

Another frequent question is the properties a material should have in order to fit this kind of business model. “Businesses worry about the material losing the qualities that make it valuable, so we need to figure out how to design a material that would withstand several product cycles.”

Metals have been an initial focus, but there is increasing attention to polymers, where certain grades are more valuable than others. The plastics used in food or medicine packaging, for example, have to meet strict standards, but they lose value if they are mixed with other plastics during recovery and recycling.

“It’s interesting to think how these plastics can be kept under stricter control,” Dr Aurisicchio explains. It’s an approach ripe for testing with a business partner both for its potential to aid recycling and as a stepping stone to an access-based approach to plastics. “The more you want to keep ownership upstream, the more you need to know who owns what, and doing that through digital technology would be very interesting.”

Meanwhile, changes in how materials circulate through the economy could open up new possibilities, for example to replace plastic packaging altogether. “Imagine a future where packaging is steel-based, and ownership of that steel remains, not even with the manufacturer of the packaging, but the steel-maker upstream,” he says.

The circular economy

The Ragn-Sells Group, which is headquartered in Sweden, is ahead of the curve when it comes to exploring this new way of thinking about materials. “We are currently going through a transformation from being a waste management company to being a circular economy-enabling company,” explains Dr Aid, who is the Group’s Innovation Coordinator and Strategist. “That can mean many different things, so we are thinking a lot about what we do.”

At the moment, for example, the company recovers materials from waste streams and sells them once, returning them to economic use. A more attractive alternative would be to own some of those materials and sell access to them as a service. Such a shift would also bring a security of supply presently lacking in the business, which will only increase as waste streams are reduced. “This is another way for us to ensure that we have material to work with in the future,” Dr Aid says.

Dr Aurisicchio was introduced to Ragn-Sells through the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which works to promote the idea of a circular economy. This led to discussions to pin down where the theory of access-based models might meet business reality. “We’ve had some high-flying discussions about how this could work, and we’ve done a lot of workshops internally,” Dr Aid says. “Marco has built up some good frameworks for psychological ownership versus physical ownership, to try to suss out how these things might actually work in practice.”

These discussions led to a short project looking at how an access-based approach might be applied to the steel sheets used to make industrial drums, which are already leased to companies who need to transport consumables such as oil. “We chose this case because it is a simple application,” Dr Aurisicchio says. “It involves one material, and that simplifies a lot of other challenges that you get when a product has many components.”

This work, which was led by Anais Engelmann and resulted in a conference paper, was supported by Imperial's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. A second UROP project followed, and Dr Aurisicchio was invited to speak to the Ragn-Sells research and development board about access-based business models.

Their next project together, funded by the Swedish strategic innovation programme RE:Source, will use the Ragn-Sells phosphorus recycling process as a case study in chemicals as a service. This process takes the ash produced when waste water treatment sludge is incinerated and recovers phosphorus, a scarce mineral essential for agriculture. Tracking this substance through all its uses is not possible, making it unsuitable as a service chemical, but other chemicals recovered as by-products are more promising.

“Our phosphorus process also pulls out the coagulant and flocculation chemicals used in waste water treatment,” Dr Aid explains. “So, we will be looking at a possible ‘chemicals as a service’ business model for waste water treatment plants. And that would be quite a tight loop.”

Mapping the flow

In addition to case studies like these, Dr Aurisicchio and Dr Zeeuw van der Laan have developed the Flow Mapper, a tool to help companies think about the way the resources that go into their products flow through the economy. It can also help them collaborate on system and product design. “It creates a holistic view of the system that flows a product through the economy, and how its socio-technical elements across different stakeholders and subsystems in the life cycle interrelate to make that system work,” says Dr Aurisicchio.

The Flow Mapper can also point out fertile areas for applying access-based business models. “We can conceptualise a system and imagine the different states of resources at different moments in time, and that has been a key driver for us to think about different moments at which business models can operate,” says Dr Zeeuw van der Laan.

“Right now, collaborations and evidence are needed to refine the concept of materials as a service and assess its suitability and success. Both small and larger organisations can contribute, but if we want to do this at scale, someone big will have to give it a push so others will join. We are talking about a complete structural shift in the production system, and that can take decades.”

Taking the approach to the next level

The access-based business model, which is most familiar from consumer goods, could eventually be extended across the whole supply chain – not only to semi-finished goods such as metal sheets but also to raw materials such as chemicals and minerals. Ultimately, it could have a transformative effect on sustainability and how we think about resource ownership.

A mining company, for instance, might sell the right to use and process iron ore to a steel producer, without giving up ownership of the material. Looking beyond private ownership, a nation state could retain ownership of the country's ore while selling the right to mine and trade it.

Dr Aurisicchio says: "While we're increasingly comfortable with paying to access goods instead of owning them, we are still nowhere near exploring the full opportunity of this idea. Ultimately, sustainability requires all organisations and individuals to see themselves as stewards of the natural world rather than just consumers of natural resources.

"Extending the concept of access over ownership from finished goods to components and materials could be a valuable way to help operationalise and make concrete this fundamental shift in mindset."