Traditionally new materials have been developed in order to solve technological problems within the aerospace, military or medicine fields. Renewable materials are developed from another perspective; they are developed in order to meet the demands from a sustainable society. If they are developed to become replacement materials, they have to be better or cheaper in order to take market shares or there has to be a political willingness to promote them. Economical subsidies are never sound and a better strategy to introduce these new materials is to identify their unique properties and possibilities and to market them. One such strategy, materials design, will be discussed in this paper. Renewable materials open for new strategies in design. Traditionally, in the LCA perspective materials should be recycled as materials and preferably as the original material quality. This implies that there has to be a limited number of materials and they need to be identifiable in order to be sorted. Renewable, natural fibre reinforced materials will degrade during recycling materials and recycling. The consequence of this is that these materials should be recycled as energy. An integrated materials and product design will therefore be a new sustainable strategy. Researchers involved in R&D of new materials have been involved in discussions and collaborations with the R&D department of companies producing and marketing materials. In parallel, industrial designers and engineers involved in product development and design have had on-going discussion with the same companies, but through their marketing department. No communication between R&D and end-product designers. This paper suggest an R&D&D concept, Research and Development and Design, a hierarchical, integrated materials and product design strategy.
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