Sustainable Product Design students create circular solutions to waste in live brief 

Second year BA(Hons) Sustainable Product Design students have recently been working with Lovat Parks, an award-winning, B Corp certified holiday park operator in the UK that offers sustainably focused coastal and countryside breaks.

As the brand works towards being recognised as a zero-landfill, circular holiday park, they have collaborated with Falmouth to bring students a live brief: to explore the various ways they can develop a guest friendly solution and receptacle that encourages guests staying at the holiday parks to recycle.    

The project began with a focus on materials innovation and prototyping, funded by SPF as part of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, where university senior technicians Oliver Hatfield and John Peters addressed the issues of material composition and process. They came up with several possibilities for students to explore within the materials library. 

Lovat’s Positive Impact Manager, Lian Locke, then introduced the students to the company’s waste report and customer survey research, as their guests drive their positive impact. She explained the work they have done so far to introduce circularity, such as creating toiletries recycling and crisp packet scheme coffee soaps, a returnable cup scheme and free borrowed use of items such as board games, beach toy boxes and belly boards. Lian shared how each intervention is effortless, fun, rewarding and different, and how they wanted the students to explore a similar approach to recycling.  

The second-year cohort were given the challenge to produce a design solution designed to make incentive and recycling on holiday second nature by intercepting dry mixed recyclables at the source. When coming up with their campaign ideas, the students were tasked with ensuring their projects consider design for behavioural change, circular design and customer engagement. In this way, their projects considered how they can encourage guests to become active participants in circular economy and motivate them to actively engage in recycling.