'Design for environment' movement seeks to leapfrog regs
By Daniel Gottlieb -- Purchasing, 3/11/1999
Plastic parts in IBM computers are designed without metal inserts to facilitate recycling. Kodak recycles single-use cameras, reusing more than 85% of the materials for making new ones. And Hewlett-Packard's procurement policy since 1993 has evaluated suppliers for environmental performance.These are some examples of what America's leading manufacturers, particularly in the electronics industry, have been doing under the banner of "design for the environment" (DFE) practices, also termed "product stewardship" in chemicals and other process industries. In many aspects, the DFE effort is simply a close look at what's coming in and going out of the plant, and tries to minimize waste at all stages of sourcing, handling, manufacturing, and product post-use.
Environmental risk or cost is being calculated into design decision-making--whether it involves a reportable toxic inventory item as a raw material, a manufacturing process that consumes more energy than necessary, or a product that creates a landfill or incineration problem at the end of its useful life. As Motorola's EHS director, Richard Guimond, says, industry needs to "consider environmental acceptability as an essential criterion for all products."
DFE, rather than responding to environmental regulation, seeks to stay a step ahead of it through innovation to avoid future problems and costly regulation that often misses its mark. Part industry marketing and part environmental good behavior, DFE involves a range of practices from pollution prevention to looking at the life cycle of products and processes to not only minimize emissions and waste but optimize use of resources. Its advocates include industry executives such as Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc., a company that includes installation and takes back its carpet tiles, and Tachi Kiuchi, CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America, who touts the efficiency of the rain forest as a model for industrial manufacturing.
The idea is to mimic nature in industrial processes, based on the behavior of natural ecosystems that maintain a balance between consumption and production of resources. DFE is rather loosely applied to a wide range of activities from recycling, energy-use reduction, and eliminating problem substances to the actual redesign of products and processes based on life-cycle analysis (LCA).
Some of the industries participating in EPA's voluntary program include printed wiring boards, metal finishing and CRTs, and flat-panel displays. Project information and publications are listed on the Web site epa.gov/dfe. The printed wiring board project already has identified several alternatives to the traditional electroless copper process, which generates large volumes of hazardous waste and uses substantial water and energy.
Although EPA seeks to promote DFE, some of its regulations still constitute barriers to implementing DFE principles, according to industry sources. An example is solid-waste regulation that classifies cathode ray tubes as hazardous waste, because they contain small amounts of lead. Hanson says EPA is considering some action to change the rules in order to facilitate CRT recycling.
Tools are needed
While simple in concept, DFE depends on data and measures of potential risks that have proven tough to come by. "Classic life-cycle analyses are very costly," says Chris Hendrickson, head of the civil and environmental engineering program at Carnegie Mellon.
Nortel's Environmental Manager Duncan Noble agrees. Nortel spent over a year on a life-cycle analysis for one of its standard business telephones. One interesting finding: Manufacturing and product distribution of the phone had far less greenhouse gas (global warming) impacts than the electricity consumption of the telephone during use.
When life-cycle analysis is applied to alternatives, such as use of plastic versus a steel gas tank, the development of comparable data becomes more complicated, Hendrickson explains. "You have to do it on a case-by-case basis," he says. "What we're doing is tool building." To cut costs and time, the Green Design Initiative has turned to more general data readily available, such as national input/ output tables, he adds.
For example, one study compared electric- or battery-powered with low-emission gas-powered vehicles. Based on operation of a million electric vehicles, half in Southern California and the other half in the New York City area, gas-powered vehicles came out ahead on environmental performance. Even though electrics would slightly reduce ozone levels (less than 1%), mining, smelting, and recycling batteries would result in 80 times more lead releases than from gas-powered vehicles.
Marc Klausner, a representative of Bosch auto supplies, which is cooperating with Carnegie Mellon, says his company is doing LCAs on several products. "The whole idea is receiving increasing attention," Klausner says. The LCA identifies environmental impacts at the early stage of design so that the company can minimize the contribution of various factors such as materials or processes. It helps reduce uncertainty, he says, by giving both economic and environmental impacts.
Other benefits of LCA, advocates note, is that waste not only can be recycled but can be identified for use in another product. At Kodak, for example, used film becomes lining for packages, saving paper. So far, however, LCA has produced few products completely redesigned for the "E factor." In evaluating some potential design changes to its telephone--a thinner plastic housing, for example--Nortel's Noble says they were found to have minimal effects on total life-cycle impact. The LCA findings that greenhouse gas and air acidification effects are greatest from the phone's use of electricity suggested some areas to focus on, according to Noble.
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