This weekend, I visited one of my favourite outdoor spots: North Gare on the northeast coast. It’s not an obvious choice for beauty. The beach is framed by heavy industry—paint processing plants, chemical works, one of the busiest container ports in the country, and a landfill site.

While it may not fit the traditional definition of “scenic,” this place is striking in its honesty. It offers an unfiltered view of the industries that have supported the region for decades. Standing there, with heavy machinery, polluting stacks (likely releasing something far from benign), and mounds of consumer waste in sight, I felt both grounded and confronted.

As a product designer, it was a stark reminder of what’s behind the curtain we’re often shielded from as consumers.

In the UK, we rarely see the full lifecycle of the products we use. Most items are manufactured far away, purchased online, and disposed of without much thought – collected by the council or shipped off to be “handled elsewhere.” We don’t witness factories melting virgin plastic pellets, container ships transporting goods across oceans, or landfill sites desperately concealing our waste. This distance makes it far easier to ignore the true impact.

The globalisation of supply chains has distanced us from the realities of consumption. As the conversation around circular economies grows, it’s clear that these discussions would be far more impactful if we were directly exposed to the processes behind our products.

What if, during early product development, we reimagined our approach? Instead of viewing products through the lens of a sprawling global supply chain, what if we considered them in the context of a self-contained community – an “island”?

It reminded me of the Channel 4 series Eden (reality TV which in my view has never been surpassed!), where participants lived in isolation, entirely reliant on the resources around them. Now imagine if our products were designed, manufactured, used, and disposed of in such a setting.

This shift in perspective would force us to confront their true impacts. Could we manage the waste left behind in our own backyard? Would the value created during the product’s life justify the environmental cost?

If we designed with this mindset – imagining the entire lifecycle of a product as something we must personally manage – we’d likely find ourselves better equipped to develop genuinely sustainable products, and more critically assess the trade-offs we might have to make.

Perhaps the path to circularity begins not with technology or policy, but with rethinking the way we view our role in the lifecycle of the things we create and use.