Charrette 2: Breville Kettle

So we were given the Breville Kettle Quiet Boil Ikon to take apart, analysed and redesigned with a focus on the environmental impacts of the product throughout its lifecycle using greenflyonline.org as our guide to green design. What we've found was that this particular electric kettle was assembled in such a way that it was practically impossible to take apart without the right tools and a huge amount of effort put into it. The worse part being, the heating elements, so the block of steel at the bottom of the kettle was glued and soldered to the main housing body and therefore the whole thing (which makes up 90% of the whole product) have to be thrown away to landfill.





The problem with the Breville kettle was we thought, after spending about 2 hrs prying it apart and looking at all the different parts, all the stuff that ended up in landfill and that goes for pretty much nearly the whole thing which is crazy cos you know, Breville being Breville with all those birds singing praises of how good they are as a design company and all, I thought would've designed the product better so they don't actually all end up as waste. But nooo, this exercise just proved to me that most design companies don't actually care, possibly because the competition is so tough, really there's just no room to add environmental cost to the product otherwise... who'd buy it?


So this is the report that came from greenfly compared to the product that we redesigned. We focused on reducing the weight by utilising less material in the housing and the base, less unnecessary parts such as the pyrex on top of the lid, making parts such as the handle as two separate moulds with the polyporpylene handle and a clip on santoprene cover rather than an overmould of 5mm thick santoprene that can't be separated. We redesigned the way it fits together so everything is a snap fit system that don't require fasteners. We also specified the manufacturing location. All the Polypropylene parts will be made in China and all the heavy weight parts such as the housing and the heating elements will be made here, thereby reducing the cost of transport and also the environmental impact of importing products from overseas.








So the product that we redesigned didn't change too much in terms of looks but manage to reduce the overall weight of the product by 20%. We also reduced the transport tonnes per kilometres from guangzhou to sydney from 10.11 t/km to 3.12 t/km. In our end of life, all parts of our product were all recyclable as compared to the almost nothing of the original product.