Associate professor Maja van der Velden and PhD candidate Ines Junge, both from DIGENT, presented research at the 3rd Product Lifetimes and the Environment (PLATE) Conference held in September in Berlin, Germany.

PLATE is organized every two years and brings actors from different sectors to discuss the product lifetimes from a sustainability context. This year’s conference included several workshops and poster sessions, and more than 100 oral presentations.

Maja presented the paper “Sustainable product lifecycles: a systemic approach to the regulation of e-waste” in the session Legal Framework for Product Longevity. The paper was written together with Postdoc Mark Taylor from the Department of Private Law, and Associate professor Martin Oteng-Ababio from the University of Ghana. The authors proposed a polycentric perspective to regulation by bringing the case of cable burning in the scrap metal yard of Agbogbloshie, Ghana.

Ines presented the paper entitled “Modularity as one principle in sustainable technology design – a design case study on ICT” in the session Design for Sustainable Products. The author explored desirable characteristics and nowadays insufficiencies within modular ICT. Through the design case review spanning over the recent decade’s marketed and conceptualized technology, she argued how modularity can contribute to Sustainable Technology and Interaction Design (StaID), a combination of fields, supposedly treated as a matter of critical design practice in future research.

Both papers were based on research in the “Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade” – SMART project, a Horizon2020-financed project coordinated by the UiO.