Whitepapers

4 Five Steps to Eco Design // • Poor integration with design activity: When eco design activities are treated as a separate stream distinct from mainstream product development activities, they struggle to gain acceptance and quickly become marginalized. This is compounded by the fact that companies often employ environmental experts, either as consultants or as part of an Environment, Health & Safety (or similar) team, to consider environmental performance and undertake environmental assessments. If the environmental expert is not in regular contact with the design team, the results of their analysis can often be ignored — either because the analysis is not presented in a way that is accessible and useful for designers, or because there is little follow-up to ensure that the analysis leads to design improvements. • Increasingly complex and rapidly developing legislation: As we saw in Section 1B, product-focused legislation, regulations, and standards are becoming increasingly complex and demanding. Simply keeping track of their potential implications is a major IT challenge that most companies have not begun to address. Take two examples: - The Energy-related Products Directive, which provides a framework for setting eco design targets for products such as high- definition televisions, is a requirement for CE marking in the EU. But the range of products affected is expanding and the implementing measures set targets that become more stringent over time. How do product development projects keep up to date? - The REACH Directive's list of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC) currently contains 219 substances (as of July 2021). But this list will be updated roughly every six months, with around 25 substances being added each year. These substances may be present, or used in the processing of, thousands of materials and coatings. As the list develops, how do companies gather substance declarations from suppliers and continually assess the risk across their product portfolio? • Designers' Requirements Not Considered: To improve the environmental performance of a product, you must first understand when and where environmental impacts occur across the product life cycle. The primary tool for building this understanding is life cycle assessment (LCA). Unfortunately, many of the commercially available software packages that enable LCA studies have been developed with LCA practitioners in mind, requiring expert knowledge of LCA methodology to conduct the analysis and interpret the results. Most designers and engineers do not possess this knowledge, which creates a major barrier to implementing eco design. Furthermore, LCA software is unsuitable for use during the early stages of the design process because it often requires detailed information about how the product is manufactured and used, as well as the input of data that is unfamiliar or unavailable to designers. • Lack of Commitment / Fear of Cost: Design teams are sometimes reluctant to begin eco design activities because of concerns about the true level of commitment behind their company's rhetoric about wanting to improve a product's environmental performance. This may be because companies have perceived eco design as a nice-to-have capability. as they begin to investigate implementing eco design in today's manufacturing organization, they are overwhelmed and quick to dismiss it as being an unnecessary and costly activity. / 3. Five Steps to Get You Started In the remainder of this white paper, we provide five simple tips to help you overcome these challenges and enable you to introduce eco design activities within your existing design process in a cost-effective and manageable manner. STEP 1: CONSIDER ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT EARLY IN THE DESIGN PROCESS It is widely claimed that 80% of a product's overall environmental impact has been "built in" by the end of the conceptual design phase (Figure 2). At this point, the designer has typically selected materials and manufacturing processes, and defined the product life cycle. These parameters constrain not just the final economic cost, but also fix many of the environmental costs. By evaluating environmental performance during this early stage, the relative environmental costs of different options can be considered, in much the same way as economic costs or material suitability would be evaluated. This enables changes to the design before significant project costs have been incurred, avoiding costly and time-consuming redesign. Figure 2: Illustration of design process against percentage of environmental impact fixed. Committed Environmental Impact

• Cover