The importance of sustainability in design engineering

By Robert Clarke, ecodesk.com

Carbon, energy, water, and waste data embedded during the design phase has more to it than simply good environmental stewardship. Design engineers can use global standards and trends in sustainability to get electronics projects off the ground, and drive accelerated development.

Design engineers have always been right at the center of product evolution. Sustainability is the latest term which essentially stands for straightforward, eternal pieces of any design - durability, efficiency and componentry. The difference in 2011 is that there are now globally accepted metrics for measuring the real currency of sustainability, and that because of these, design engineering can now benefit, not be hindered by the microscopic approach to cost cutting and budget constraints. We are arriving at a level of maturity in the sustainability sector that has gone unreported in the opportunities it represents, in creating a measurable buy-in for senior management.

First – It’s all about the numbers

Before we analyze a business case and strategic opportunities, we need to focus on the current state of play. There are two types of measurement approaches which by now will have become familiar for design engineers, which both widely deliver absolute data for 4 main currencies, which have become commonplace, namely Carbon emissions (metric tonnes of CO2-equivalent), energy use (gigajoules), water use (cubic metres), and waste (subdivided into waste type, in cubic  meters):

1. Embodied footprints are the product of the above metrics (carbon, energy, water, waste) and expressed in terms of what it takes to produce a product or service, and measured by unit of output. E.g. the manufacture of an electrical appliance, a car, a building, or even an event with a finite lifetime. Life cycle analysis, (LCA) measures the embodied footprints of a product, and is increasingly sophisticated, with thousands of data sets already built in. Best-selling tools worldwide include SimaPro and Sustainable Minds.
2. Operational footprints measure the output of an operating product or service (e.g. an electrical appliance, power station, or organisation) over time.  They are commonly measured  by tracking Environmental Management Systems which are in common use with large companies. Typical examples are CG from Carbon Guerilla, and offerings from the usual suspects, including SAP and CA Technologies.

It’s important to make sure footprints are verified and most importantly communicated properly online. Our experience with Ecodesk.com, where we track over 17,000 company data sets, is that full public disclosure generally drives organisations forward to achieve better and better overall results. Most companies use guidelines for measurement provided by the GRI, BSI or ISO, standards operators who develop measurement protocols which can be bought reasonably cheaply and applied to different sectors.

Of course, many products have an embodied footprint as well as an operational one. For example, a car has an embodied carbon footprint that takes into account its manufacture, within a boundary definition agreed by industry, expressed in tonnes of CO2-equivalent (tCO2-e). It also has an operational footprint, express in grams of Co2-e per kilometer. A company has an operational footprint expressed as tCO2-e/year. Thousands of company footprint examples can be found at www.ecodesk.com/sustainability.

Next: using solid data to design-in business benefit

“What gets measured gets managed” is the best way to describe the business case behind sustainability metrics. Carbon, energy, water and waste data embedded during the design phase has more to it than simply good environmental stewardship.

If you can work the sustainability metrics in to the design stage, so much the better. The approach can help get the project get up and running, says Steve Lipmann, Head of Sustainability with Microsoft: “The more a scorecard can be tied to things your company cares about the better. The metrics need to grab your management’s attention and relate to cost and quality to be effective. Microsoft has a number of decentralised purchasing groups that handle different aspects of our sourcing and we want to drive more consistency across them from a reporting perspective. From a materiality perspective, we have the most mature program come out of our hardware products. For example, we have an expert in our Xbox factories, overseeing the line every day. Microsoft has a number of companies that do our final assembly of products and we report their carbon emissions for them. This gives us a good understanding of their business processes and where they can improve.”

In other words, if you track back the sourcing process and embed it inside the design, in this case of Xbox, months, maybe years before it is finally rolled out, you can dictate the efficiency of certain suppliers and parts manufacturers before they begin the process – perhaps even while they are bidding for the supply position in the first place. Developing this kind of competitive tendering, not just in dollars, but in embodied carbon, energy, water use, and waste output is not only economically great for driving down costs, but also helps the resulting narrative in product development to sell the product to an increasingly sustainability sensitive buying audience. 

Kevin Bennett, a DHL employee based in Singapore, confirmed this design-led approach “We have found that by starting with the measurement and then investing in the behavioural changes is much more effective, right from design stage but also in process improvement. For example, we have a simple procedure in place within our service centers. The conveyor belts would be left running all day, as the employees wouldn’t know when a truck would come and wanted to be ready. This behaviour was changed by putting switches closer to where they work, making it easier to switch them on and off. It sounds simple but the knock on effect has been huge. Similarly, complex in-car telemetry is on our radar too – the system requires more investment but the business case is along the same lines.”

Illustration: Top 30 Global Electronics companies ranked in order of metric tonnes of Co2-equivalent (commonly termed a “carbon footprint”). Source: www.Ecodesk.com For full report and assumptions, go to www.ecodesk.com/sustainability/electronics.

There are definite dangers if misrepresentation brought about by increased measurement. At Microsoft again, the transfer to cloud computing will drive electricity efficiency with products and services among companies has presented an interesting challenge. Steve Lippman again: “We have set a 30% normalized reduction goal [in carbon emissions]from 2007 to 2012. Unfortunately we won’t meet this even though we’ve done great things with our efficiency, because we set the goal just before a titanic shift in our business model to cloud computing. We are now moving our customer’s data into our more efficient data centres and including their emissions as our own. This means that from an accounting point of view our emissions go up, but we know from work we’ve done with Accenture and Global Environmental Consultancy, it will cause global net emissions to fall”.

Despite these anomalies, overwhelmingly the news is positive when applied design engineering projects. In an interview with the British Standards Institute (BSI) we found the overwhelming driver is cost, followed by legislative compliance and supply chain pressures. BSI conducted post-certification of all clients who are using core products ISO14001, where 27,500 respondents were asked 4 key questions:

• Has ISO 14001 driven cost savings?           66% reported positive results
• Increased reputation?                                   80% positive
• Enhanced regulatory compliance?            81% positive
• Increased employee morale?                     64% positive

It’s worth noting we have effectively hijacked these figures to apply to the relative benefit of sustainability as a whole, but I think the correlation is close. It really illustrates a very significant increase in accountability and measurement which goes right down the line from supplier to manufacturer to customer. Business customers in turn increasingly want proof that the products meet their own higher and higher standards. Design engineering using sustainability principles at the heart of the concept phase can do a great deal to accelerate buy-in, deployment and success all the way along the product development route.

Robert Clarke is founder of Ecodesk.com

www.ecodesk.com is the largest online database of sustainability information relating to companies and products worldwide, with detailed data available on carbon, energy, waste and water usage, as well as information on product development. The full interview with Microsoft, DHL and other electronics professionals is available, together with downloads of measurement software and training apps on our website.