Marcel Niederberger was recently in Melbourne with the V-ZUG Australia team, and I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with him about the company’s sustainability strategy – from the macro to the micro.
It’s human nature to think linearly. Time, chronology, forward and back, this equals that – but this two-dimensional comprehension is not going to solve some of the more pressing issues of our time. V-ZUG’s Head of Sustainability, Marcel Niederberger, is turning the linearity of production and supply chains into a wheel.
The Swiss appliance maker doesn’t just talk about sustainability as a branding exercise; it embeds it deeply into how the company thinks, designs and acts. Recycling can no longer be the baseline for responsibility, as such V-ZUG is looking even further to a future where materials loop back.
Circularity, as Niederberger shares, emerged not from idealism but from data. “We invested in our lifecycle analysis to understand where our biggest impact lies,” he explains. “Energy efficiency was already visible and regulated. But when we looked at the material side – that’s where we found the bigger, less solved challenge.”
That thinking has seeded a new internal framework: 10 principles for circular design, now guiding V-ZUG’s cross-disciplinary teams. It’s a directive not just to build better, but to think backwards and forwards simultaneously, asking questions like: what materials from the old model can we reuse? How do we design to dismantle? How do we avoid emotional obsolescence (where aesthetics or software updates render perfectly good products useless)?
What V-ZUG is exploring isn’t limited to the insides of its appliances. Its entire production site in Zug has become a living case study – a vertical factory with solar-lined façades, buildings constructed with timber and recycled concrete, even concrete enhanced with captured CO₂. But what really underpins all of this, says Niederberger, is “the mandate from the top.” Sustainability isn’t a bolt-on. It’s a brief.
“Circular economy can’t be done alone,” he admits. Collaboration with suppliers, recyclers and even competitors is key. Plastics are particularly tricky: once shredded, high-value polymers like ABS become low-grade mulch. But if dismantled and returned intact, they can be reused with the same value.
“We invested in our lifecycle analysis to understand where our biggest impact lies. Energy efficiency was already visible and regulated. But when we looked at the material side – that’s where we found the bigger, less solved challenge.”
There’s also the reality of electronics, which remain the elephant in the room. They’re energy intensive, hard to recycle and increasingly integrated on multiple parts of a product, from touchscreens to smart features. But the key is to make incremental change.
Here, V-ZUG takes a longer view, challenging its own design assumptions. What if the desirable choice and dominating aesthetic inclination isn’t glossy and new, but tactile, textured, recycled? What if beauty lies in understanding, not just how a product looks, but where it comes from and where it’s going?
For Australian architects and designers, where our recycling systems are fragmented, and most homes are drafty, V-ZUG’s approach offers both a challenge and an invitation. It’s shifting the perception of value – materials that last, systems that loop and a future that remembers its past.
