Environmental rules of the 1990s focus on the products themselves." Regulators want to see both greener PC manufacturing plants and greener PCs.
Additionally, users are demanding environment-friendly PCs. Led by public authorities in northern Europe, green-minded computer buyers have plumped for bans on certain materials, green guidelines for public procurement, and eco- and energy-label programs.
The key to reducing environmental and financial costs of manufactured products is the design process. "About 80 percent of a product's environmental costs are established in the conceptual- design phase," says Agis Veroutis of environmental consultant Roy F. Weston (West Chester, PA, U.S.). "The sooner in the design phase you start analyzing the environmental impact, the better the results."
Measure Environmental Impact
What designers therefore need is a yardstick to measure
the environmental performance of a product design. A new breed of tools, collectively called design-for-environment (DfE) software, lets product developers analyze the environmental impact of their concepts. These tools comprise several databases of environmental evaluation factors and aim at product designers rather than environmental experts.
The core functions of DfE programs are eco-impact reduction and disposal optimization. However, out of the 15 tools we considered, only two of them, Ecobalance's DfE Tool and Boothroyd Dewhurst's Design for Environment, can do both.
This is not surprising, because the two functions of DfE software are distinct and independent tasks. Eco-impact reduction compares the environmental effects of a product's design options, using life-cycle assessment, or LCA. (See the sidebar "Life-Cycle Assessment".) The idea of LCA is to find the design option that scores best when considering all effects on, for example, global warming, marine pollution, or waste-disposal pro
blems.
In disposal optimization, the idea is to model and experiment with the disposal options for a given product. Typically, there are many possibilities.
You can dismantle or shred products or components, or deliver them whole for reuse, recycling, incineration, landfill, or any mixture thereof. In theory, the final optimized design should cause the lowest environmental burden and include the optimal number of reusable parts, no hazardous material, and a high degree of recyclable material.
You must do disposal optimization before you build the product. "Sometimes, just a slight reconfiguration of a machine's internals can make dismantling ever so much easier," says Mark Curtis, a senior partner at Boothroyd Dewhurst. But he warns that disassembly is not just assembly in reverse order. "Fasteners can get rusty, glues can refuse to unstick, and things don't always go out the way they came in."
Architecture of Tools
At the core of DfE software is a
component-
inventory
database. It holds large amounts of environmentally relevant data such as emissions, energy consumption, dismantling times, and recyclability indexes for electronics parts such as batteries, capacitors, and ICs.
A design module represents components visually and shows how they link together to form the product. This module retrieves the environmental information from the inventory database and displays it on the screen.
In eco-impact reduction, the software then aggregates eco-impact information into a few categories or even a single-number index. Two common indexes are Eco-Indicator, created in the Netherlands, and EcoPoints, developed in Switzerland. These indicators compare the eco-impact of a design to a fixed reference such as human- or eco-toxicity, thereby generating a relative score per eco-impact (e.g., for global warming or acid rain). The design with the lowest sum of these relative scores is best in
environmental
terms.
In disposal analysis, th
e software runs a sophisticated optimization process before aggregation and reporting. Several vendors have developed proprietary algorithms that model the component structure and solve for an optimum level of disassembly. Defining the optimum can be intricate. As Otto Meedt, one of the developers of Regred/DisPlay software from FAPS, points out, "If two aluminum parts are held together by an aluminum rivet, it may be better to recycle all three parts together rather than separating them."
It is on this optimization knowledge and expert judgment that DfE tools are competing. Many vendors supply proprietary component databases and optimization algorithms aimed at producers of electronics equipment. Vendors point out the paucity of public domain information in this area. "Environmental data on some components is costly to develop and commercially sensitive," remarks Martin Wielemaker, a director at Turtle Bay.
Naturally, product designers want to swap component databases around under one DfE system.
But because systems are incompatible, this is not yet possible.
Standardization Is Coming
Four competing initiatives are addressing the standardization of component databases, not only for electronics but other industries as well. They are the LCAD group in the U.S., led by Battelle (Columbus, OH); SPINE, a Swedish group run by Chalmers University (Göteborg); the DALCA team in the Netherlands, led by research institute TNO (Delft); and the industry consortium SPOLD in Brussels. All these groups concede that, at best, a broad integration of databases will need some more years and that the more specialized the data, the less likely it ever will become public.
However, in an attempt to open the component inventory, some manufacturers have published their data. For example, about a year ago, Delta Electronics Testing published detailed material balances on about 50 components common to electronics goods, plus details on the hazardous content and disposability of each material.
The
reason for the industry's and software vendors' sensitivity in this field is that information about hazardous materials is not always public. An electronics device, for example, has a number of hazardous materials (e.g., brominated flame retardants and sometimes cadmium and mercury compounds) that are not labeled and tend to be a problem to dispose.
Low-Cost Tools
For now, say some vendors, the answer for manufacturers is to buy what they can afford and build the rest of the expert judgment internally. "Most companies will want to use their own expertise anyway," notes Remi Coulon of Ecobalance. "It all depends on how they view their environmental situation."
Vendors such as Conceptware, Decision Dynamics, Product Ecology Consultants, and Spinwest encourage users to start with their less-expert packages, which are considerably cheaper than the ones with built-in expert systems. This is especially helpful if a vendor's proprietary component inventory doesn't meet a manufacturer's environm
ental compatibility standards. In this case, companies can buy cheap software and build their own expert judgment and database.
Another competitive factor is integration with CAD systems. This is especially important if designers use DfE tools on a day-to-day basis. Says Stefan Utzinger, the managing director of Conceptware, "CAD integration is a way of building the environmental expert right into the designer's desktop."
Thus far, only Nortel/Cognition's EcoDesign Tool and Savantage's SavanSys have a direct link to Intergraph's CAD system Pro Engineer. However, Boothroyd Dewhurst, Ecobalance, and FAPS have all built their offerings with CAD linkage in mind.
DfE tools are proliferating. By the end of the year, there will be about 15 commercially available tools. While some industry experts expect a shakeout of DfE tools during 1998, the user base for DfE tools will be growing steadily. Says Weston's Veroutis, "At the end of this century, every electronic product manufacturer will have a DfE
system in place."
Where to Find
Boothroyd Dewhurst
Wakefield, RI, U.S.
Phone: +1 401 783 5840
Internet:
http://www.dfma.com/Dfe.htm
Greener Design
