Reducing Environmental Impact

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Reducing Environmental Impact
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EPAs View (from Life-Cycle Design Guidance
Manual)

• Environmental requirements should minimize
• raw materials consumption
• energy consumption
• waste generation
• health and safety risks
• ecological degradation

Do you agree with this?
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US Congressional View

• A congressional view on the issue is reflected in
  (or at least influenced by) the report "Green
  Products by Design Choices for a Cleaner
  Environment" from the Office of Technology
  Assessment (OTA-E-541), published in October 1992.

Green design consists of two complementary goals.
Design for waste prevention avoids the
generation of waste in the first place design
for better materials management facilitates the
handling of products at the end of their service
life. SOURCE Office of Technology Assessment,
1992.
Do you agree?
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Policy Implications
Based upon (inter)national studies, the Office of
Technology Assessment states

• The environmental evaluation of a product or
  design should not be based upon a single
  attribute, such as recyclability.
• The trend toward increasing product complexity
  seems certain to make the environmental
  evaluation of products more difficult and
  expensive in the future.
• Policies to encourage green design should be
  flexible enough to accommodate the rapid pace of
  technological change and the broad array of
  design choices and tradeoffs.
• The biggest environmental gains will likely come
  from policies that provide incentives for greener
  production and consumption systems, not just
  greener products

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Guiding Principles according to OTA

• Principle 1 Identify the root problem and
  define it clearly.
• All the different perceptions on "the
  environmental problem" are not helping solving
  the problem. The tradeoffs and interactions
  between the problems have to be considered
  carefully.
• Principle 2 Give designers maximum flexibility
  that is consistent with solving the problem.
• Strict regulations and rigid Federal mandates
  will have adverse effects. Promote flexibility
  (in policies).
• Principle 3
• Encourage a systems approach to green design.
• Don't just focus on the component, but look at
  the big picture. For example, German automakers
  are rethinking their entire "ecology" of car
  production and disposal.

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A Classification of Environmental Impact
Reduction Efforts
From Coulter, S., B.A. Bras and C. Foley
(1995). A Lexicon of Green Engineering Terms,
10th International Conference on Engineering
Design (ICED 95), V. Hubka Ed., Praha, Czech
Republic, Heurista, Zurich, Switzerland, pp.
1033-1039. Bras, B., 1997, "Incorporating
Environmental Issues in Product Realization,"
Industry and Environment, United Nations UNEP/IE
(invited contribution), Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (double
issue), pp. 7-13, 1997.
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Classification

• Three classes of approaches can be identified
• those which are applied within a single product
  life-cycle and focus on specific life-cycle
  stages,
• those that focus on a complete product life-cycle
  and cover all life-cycle stages, and
• those that go beyond single product life-cycles.

Product Life-Cycle
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Approaches Focusing on Specific Life-Cycle Stages

• Traditional environmental engineering is
  concerned with managing the fate, transport, and
  control of contaminants in water supplies and
  discharges, air emissions, and solid wastes
  (after pollutants have been generated, or at the
  end of the pipe).
• Pollution prevention usually focuses on
  elimination of pollutants from existing products
  and process technologies.
• With the exception of Design for Environment,
  environmentally oriented Design for X approaches
  are all focused on a specific aspect of a
  products life-cycle (e.g., Design for
  Disassembly, Design for Recycling)
• A danger of focusing too much on specific DFX
  approaches (or specific aspects of a product
  life-cycle in general) is that strong
  concentration on a single environmental aspect
  may negatively affect other aspects and render
  the product less environmental friendly as a
  whole.

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Approaches Focusing on a Complete Product
Life-Cycle

• In Design for Environment, Life-Cycle Design,
  Environmentally Conscious Design and
  Manufacturing, and Green Design, the scope of
  considerations, both in terms of time and the
  environment, is the life cycle of one product.
• All these approaches have similar goals and
  encourage a holistic product view.
• However, it has already been recognized by many
  that this may not be enough.
• For example, modern manufacturers often rely on
  multiple suppliers, have multiple product lines,
  multiple facilities, often in multiple countries.

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ECDM, DFE, Life-Cycle Design, etc.

• Environmentally Conscious Design Manufacture
  (ECDM) and other Design for Environment (DFE)
  efforts are largely motivated by a drive to
  reduce the (negative) impact of engineering
  systems (products, processes) on their
  environment.
• Environmental impact occurs throughout a
  products life cycle by means of unwanted and
  unnecessary energy and material consumptions and
  emissions.
• Design for Environment Systematic
  consideration of design performance with respect
  to environmental, health, and safety objectives
  over the full product and process life-cycle
• (Joseph Fiksel, Design for Environment
   Creating Eco-Efficient Products and Processes,
  McGraw-Hill, 1996).
• Sustainable Development is considered the
  ultimate goal
• Economic growth that is in harmony with the
  environment

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Approaches Going Beyond Single Product Life-Cycles

• In industrial ecology, companies, organizations
  and communities work together to minimize
  environmental impact and use each others waste in
  an intelligent manner for creating new products.
  
• Industrial ecology is not limited to a single
  product life cycle, but considers the
  interactions of several product life cycles (of
  possibly different lengths) over a larger time
  scale.
• Sustainable development is the broadest but also
  the least well-defined approach in terms of tools
  and methods.
• The United Nations World Commission on
  Environment and Development in their report Our
  Common Future, defines sustainable development as
  development that meets the needs of the present
  generation without compromising the needs of
  future generations.
• It is generally agreed that sustainable
  development requires at least pollution
  prevention, consideration of life-cycle
  consequences of production, and an approach that
  imitates natural or biological processes.