The MOS UpLift™ is an accessory designed for outdoor enthusiasts: lowering onto the side of the vehicle, it makes it easy to load and unload your equipment. So outdoor experiences in the mountains become accessible at the snap of a finger! To align itself with its users’ love of nature, MOS is working hard to make the design of the MOS UpLift™ as eco-responsible as possible over time.
Joey Hébert, founder and CEO of MOS, shares with us the company’s approach to eco-design, a continuous progress approach that aims to ensure that a product respects the environment at every stage of its life cycle.
Disassembly from A to Z
First of all, what you need to know is that the MOS UpLift™ is eco-designed. This means that every decision we take seeks to minimize the rack’s environmental impact. The rack can be completely disassembled, and we favor single-material assemblies that make recycling much easier. So one person can unscrew the MOS UpLift™ and take it completely apart to recycle each component separately. All parts are recyclable.
Not all everyday appliances are thought of this way. Try to find just one appliance that you could 100% disassemble. It’s not that easy! There are often bits of plastic stuck to other materials.
Responsible improvements
Eco-design also means improving the product without leaving any parts behind. We make modifications to the MOS UpLift™, ensuring that they are backwards compatible on the racks we already have.
For example, if a component of the rack were to fail, we would be able to provide you with a small box so that you could carry out the repair or replacement of the part at home, rather than sending you a new rack and throwing your old one in the garbage.
Boomerang, the lifecycle study
Since 2018, we’ve been collaborating with the Product Development Institute in Montreal, whose mission is to promote the best practices in product development and eco-design among manufacturing companies. We thus joined the 2018 Boomerang cohort, a specific program aimed at helping companies implement eco-design practices in its products, but also in its business model.
The program helped us conduct a preliminary life cycle study of the MOS UpLift™ and we came up with a first major conclusion. We realized that the biggest environmental impact of the mount was not its manufacture or even its end-of-life, but rather the additional fuel consumption required when it’s still on the roof, but not in use.
Our team therefore concentrated on perfecting the system for attaching the MOS UpLift™ to the roof bars. For us, it was vital that the rack became extremely easy to install and uninstall. Now, someone who doesn’t use their rack for a few weeks can loosen a few bolts and remove it in less than a minute.
Thinking ahead
Every little improvement counts in minimizing environmental impact! That’s why our team is committed to studying every choice we make when it comes to materials, packaging and freight methods.
In the long run, we also hope to bring to market a rack that folds in on itself, offering greater aerodynamics and consuming less fuel. We’re already hard at work on this model! With this model, there will be less risk of snagging in underground parking lots or garages. In a way, it’s our ideal product, even if manufacturing costs are potentially higher. We’ll be approaching this new bracket as a completely different project!
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