If you’re familiar with home renovation, you’ll know the trigger-loaded cartridge used to squirt silicon behind the kitchen sink or around the shower recess. But have you thought about all those tubes ending up in landfill?
As chairman of theconstruction supplies company Torggler, Tobias Johannes has. Silicon cartridges are contaminated after use, making them non-recyclable, so about 600 million plastic cartridges go to landfill annually, he explains. ‘It bothers me that, in 50 years, nobody has thought up a more sustainable way to apply this common building material.’
Johannes wanted a fresh take on packaging design for the company and, as a former exchange student at what’s now the Aalto School of Business, he knew where to find it.
The Product Development Project (PdP) is a course designed primarily for master’s students from any background, be it tech, business, art and design, science or anthropology. Students work across disciplines, with real companies, to solve real world challenges. Companies can sign up as partners, setting the challenge and sponsoring cooperation with the next generation of product developers.
‘If you want to be successful in innovation, you need everybody working together on projects – cross-functional teams – and that’s super challenging for an established company. We saw the opportunities and signed up,’ says Torggler CEO Benno Pamer. The students selected their project and collaborators, and the Italian company was paired with a multidisciplinary team with members from seven different countries. Their challenge: design a more sustainable way of packaging and delivering silicon.
Industrial design student Owein Iveson was drawn to this challenge because he ‘saw potential to make something quite revolutionary in quite a dormant market.’ Specialising in mass production, for him it was the perfect case study. Meanwhile, for chemical engineer Amanda Lahtinen the lure was the sustainability angle, the chance to use her interest in bio-based products and materials to solve an impactful, real-world problem.
‘We started with desktop research to gain a fundamental understanding of the problem. And then we did a lot of interviews with the end users,’ says Iveson. ‘In the beginning we tried to think: OK, forget the cartridge. But when we realised the market was so stubborn, we kept coming back to that form – but how to do it better,’ adds Lahtinen.
They spent nine months working to design a better product alongside eight other students from fields including automation, engineering and economics. According to both students, the best aspects of the experience related to the richness of ideas stemming from both the internationality and cross-disciplinarity of the team. The result: two completely different solutions, both of which now have patents pending.
Torggler staff are excited – not only with the solutions, but with the whole process. They’re hoping to keep the collaboration going and to participate in the PdP again.
‘This young way of working, of collaborating across different fields, not having the same blocks or gaps, it’s crucial for us,’ says Pamer. ‘The results are fantastic, but the value is more than that. It’s helped us in our vision for the whole company.’
From portable flight simulators to compostable shoe inner-soles, many product ideas were born at PdP. The teams present their work at the annual PdP gala each spring. See past creations and learn more about being a corporate partner or a student here:
This article has been published in the (issuu.com) September 2025.
Product Development Project (PdP) is a five-period-long course that invites Master’s students from all backgrounds, but mainly engineering, industrial design, and business, to tackle challenges of collaborating companies. The teams form in September and deliver a functioning prototype in the final Gala in May.
