Sustainability Robotics: Machines That Work With Nature

Most robots are made to last and then thrown away. Barbara Mazzolai’s lab builds some that are made to disappear on purpose. In an IEEE Spectrum interview published September 22, 2026, Mazzolai laid out sustainability robotics as a field with three pillars rather than a slogan: minimize the environmental impact of the machine, make it accessible across socioeconomic boundaries, and design it so humans and the natural system both come out ahead. The idea reframes a question kids ask constantly and adults rarely answer well, what happens to the robot afterward?

Key Takeaways

• Mazzolai is associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and directs its Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory. She trained as a biologist first, then as an engineer.
• Her definition has three pillars: minimizing environmental impact, ensuring accessibility across socioeconomic boundaries, and creating “symbiotic” designs that benefit both humans and nature.
• The practical demand is life-cycle thinking at design time: robots that can be reused, recycled or biodegraded rather than landfilled.
• Her lab’s named projects include PLANTOID (root-strategy robots), GrowBot (robots that move by growing, like climbing plants) and I-Seed (biodegradable soft robots inspired by plant seeds), alongside octopus-inspired soft manipulators.
• The scale of the problem is documented. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 recorded 62 million tonnes of electronic waste generated in 2022, with only 22.3 percent formally recycled, and projects 82 million tonnes by 2030.

What sustainability robotics actually claims

Sustainability robotics is an approach to robot design that treats environmental cost, affordability and ecological benefit as engineering requirements rather than afterthoughts. That sentence is doing something specific. In ordinary robotics, “requirements” means payload, cycle time, accuracy, uptime. Mazzolai is arguing that footprint belongs on that list, where it can be traded against the others and measured.

Her own framing, from the September 22, 2026 interview with Edd Gent: “We need to reduce the footprint of our technology.” And the reason she thinks this reframing opens doors rather than closing them is that she wants robotics rethought “in a different way to open new possibilities.”

Her background explains the angle. Mazzolai holds a master’s in biology from the University of Pisa, a master’s in eco-management, and a Ph.D. in microsystems engineering from Tor Vergata University of Rome. She started as a biologist and moved into engineering, which is the reverse of the usual path in bioinspired robotics. The difference shows up in how she talks about nature: not as a catalog of clever mechanisms to copy, but as a system the robot has to live inside.

The third pillar is the unusual one. “Symbiotic” design means the robot’s operation should produce some benefit to the natural system it works in, not merely avoid harm. A soil-monitoring robot that measures moisture and then dissolves, leaving nothing behind, is a different proposition from a soil-monitoring robot you have to go collect.

The projects, and the mechanism behind them

Four lines of work in her lab are worth understanding, because each one solves a problem by giving up something robots usually insist on.

The lab’s own framing is “from nature to nature,” and its stated biological models are plant roots, climbing plants, seeds, octopuses, snails and earthworms. The projects carry names worth knowing if your kid starts reading papers: PLANTOID for root strategies, GrowBot for growth-based locomotion, I-Seed for biodegradable seed robots, I-Wood for plant–fungus communication.

Plant-root-inspired drilling robots. Roots don’t push through soil the way a drill does. They grow, adding material at the tip while the rest of the structure stays put. Mazzolai’s group builds robots that do the same thing using miniaturized 3D printers carried onboard, extruding new body as they advance. The engineering payoff is enormous: a growing robot exerts almost no friction along its length, because the body behind the tip isn’t sliding against anything. A conventional probe fights the entire column of soil it has passed through. A growing one doesn’t.

Tendril-like robots that coil. Climbing plants find a support and wrap around it, which is a way of gripping without a gripper. Coiling converts a long flexible body into a mechanical anchor using only its own shape. No motors at the contact point, no fingers to break.

Octopus-tentacle-inspired soft robots. A tentacle has no joints and effectively infinite degrees of freedom. That makes it terrible for precise positioning and excellent for grabbing irregular objects without crushing them: the trade-off that soft robotics keeps rediscovering.

A biodegradable seed robot (I-Seed). This is the one that makes the whole field click for a kid. Build a device shaped like a seed, let it be carried and buried by wind and rain, have it sense something, and then let it break down. The entire concept of retrieval disappears from the system design.

How to Teach Your Kid About Sustainability Robotics

This topic teaches better with trash than with kits.

Ages 5–8: The “where does it go?” walk

Take one broken toy with a battery in it. Ask where it goes when you throw it away, and then actually look up your municipality’s e-waste rule together. Most kids are genuinely surprised that the answer is “not the regular trash.” Then do the fun half: find three things in the yard that nature took apart (a leaf skeleton, a rotting stick, a rusty nail) and three things it clearly hasn’t, like a plastic bottle cap. Sort them into “nature can eat this” and “nature can’t.”

Ages 9–12: Build a growing robot (sort of)

Give them a drinking straw, tape, and a roll of paper. The challenge: move a marker tip 30 centimeters forward through a cardboard tube by adding material at the front, never pushing the whole thing from behind. Then compare: push a pencil through a tube of sand versus feed a string through it. They’ll feel the friction difference immediately. That’s the root-growth insight, and they discovered it with hands instead of a lecture.

Ages 13+: Life-cycle assessment on one object

Pick one gadget in the house, earbuds are ideal. Have them list every material they can identify, then research which of those are recoverable and which aren’t. Lithium cells, rare-earth magnets, glued plastics. The deliverable is a one-page redesign: what would you change so this thing could be taken apart? This is a real engineering document, and it’s the exact exercise Mazzolai is describing when she says life-cycle thinking belongs at design time.

The question to ask: “If a robot is supposed to disappear after it finishes its job, what can’t it be made of?”

Conventional robot design vs. sustainability robotics

Design question	Conventional answer	Sustainability robotics answer
Lifetime goal	Last as long as possible	Last exactly as long as needed, then degrade or be recovered
End of life	Someone else’s problem	A design requirement with a specified pathway
Materials	Whatever performs best	Performance weighed against recoverability and toxicity
Retrieval after deployment	Assumed	Sometimes deliberately removed from the plan
Cost target	What the industrial buyer will pay	Accessible across income levels
Relationship to the environment	Operate in it	Benefit it, or at least leave it unchanged
Movement strategy	Push, roll, walk	Also: grow, coil, swell, decay

What a family can do with this idea

Make end-of-life a question you ask out loud

When a kid wants a gadget, add one question to the usual two. Not just “what does it do” and “what does it cost,” but “what happens to it when it stops working?” It takes four seconds and it reframes consumption permanently. The UN numbers give it teeth: 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, 22.3 percent formally recycled, and a projected 82 million tonnes by 2030 as recycling rates are expected to fall toward 20 percent.

Choose repairable over impressive

A robot kit with screws beats a robot kit with glue, every time, for learning. Glued and ultrasonically welded enclosures are a direct expression of the “don’t worry about end-of-life” philosophy. Our comparison of robotics kits and what they actually teach covers which platforms are genuinely serviceable.

Separate bioinspiration from biomimicry theater

Plenty of products borrow an animal’s look without borrowing its mechanism. Mazzolai’s growing robots borrow the mechanism, material added at the tip, no friction along the shaft, and that’s why they work differently rather than just looking different. Teaching a kid to ask “what does the biology actually do here?” filters out most of the noise.

Point at soft robotics as a field with room

Soft robotics is young, underpopulated and cheap to start in. A kid with silicone, a syringe and some tubing can build a working pneumatic actuator for the price of a pizza. That’s a real on-ramp, unlike humanoid robotics, which requires capital. Our guide to building a robot at home after the humanoid hype lays out the sequence.

What not to do

Don’t let this turn into guilt. A kid who concludes that all technology is bad has learned something useless and demoralizing. The field Mazzolai is describing is fundamentally optimistic, it assumes we’ll keep building machines and argues we can build them better. Keep that framing, because it’s the accurate one and it’s also the one that produces engineers.

What to Watch For Over the Next 3 Months

• Week 4: Watch for an environmental-cost figure in a robot product announcement, embodied carbon, recycled material percentage, stated disassembly path. Almost no robotics company publishes one today. The first that does will be worth noting.
• Month 2 red flags: “Eco” or “biodegradable” claims on a robot or kit with no standard cited. Biodegradability is defined against specific conditions, time frames and test standards. A claim with no standard attached is marketing.
• Month 3 self-check: Can your kid explain why a growing robot has less friction than a pushed one? That single mechanical insight is the most transferable thing in this article, and it shows up again in everything from endoscopes to tunneling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is sustainability robotics a real academic field or a rebrand?

It’s early. Mazzolai is explicitly trying to establish it as a field, which means the name is newer than the work. The underlying research (soft robotics, bioinspired design, biodegradable electronics) has existed for years in separate communities. What’s new is the argument that they belong together under shared requirements.

Do biodegradable robots actually work?

The seed-robot concept has been demonstrated in research settings. Whether biodegradable devices can match the sensing precision and lifetime of conventional electronics is an open question, and anyone who tells you it’s solved is overselling. The honest status is: promising, narrow, not yet deployed at scale.

Isn’t a robot that dissolves just litter?

That’s the right question to ask, and it depends entirely on what it dissolves into. A device that breaks into microplastics is pollution. A device whose components become soil constituents is not. The distinction lives in the material choice, which is why materials science is doing much of the real work in this field.

Where would my kid study this?

Programs in soft robotics, bioinspired engineering, materials science and mechanical engineering all touch it. Mazzolai’s own path, from biology into engineering, suggests the biology side is a legitimate entry point, which is unusual and worth telling a kid who likes animals more than circuits.

How does this connect to the robots in the news?

Barely, and that’s informative. Humanoid robots are heavy, metal-and-rare-earth-intensive, and designed for maximum capability. Almost nothing in sustainability robotics applies to them directly. The two branches are optimizing for different things, which is a useful illustration that “robotics” is not one field.

Is there a cheap experiment that shows the soft robotics idea?

Yes. Seal a party balloon inside a folded paper sleeve, inflate it, and watch the sleeve bend. You just built a bending pneumatic actuator with the same working principle as a research soft gripper. Add a second one facing the other way and you have opposed motion.

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About the author

Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.

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Sources

1. Gent, E. (2026, September 22). “Barbara Mazzolai Wants to Build a New Field of Robotics.” IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/sustainability-robotics-barbara-mazzolai
2. Baldé, C. P., et al. (2024). The Global E-waste Monitor 2024. ITU and UNITAR. https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/
3. International Federation of Robotics. (2026, September 24). “Five Million Robots now Operate in Factories Globally.” https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/five-million-robots-now-operate-in-factories-globally
4. Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. “Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory” (PLANTOID, GrowBot, I-Seed, I-Wood project pages). https://www.iit.it/web/bioinspired-soft-robotics
5. Ackerman, E. (2025, September 11). “Reality Is Ruining the Humanoid Robot Hype.” IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-robot-scaling
6. Miki, T., Lee, J., Hwangbo, J., Wellhausen, L., Koltun, V., & Hutter, M. (2022). “Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild.” Science Robotics, 7(62). https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08117