Eco Design for Climate Change Mitigation

1. The engineering response to climate change

Climate change caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is recognised by governments and organisations around the world as a major threat to the prosperity and quality of life of our society. The response of the engineering community in addressing this challenge can be categorised into three classes:

1. Dedicated climate change mitigation technologies – entirely new types of product or system whose sole purpose is to mitigate climate change impacts e.g. carbon capture and sequestration
2. Development and application of ‘Eco design’ approaches – methods and tools intended to support the development of products, systems  or services with a lower  greenhouse gas emissions intensity than the ‘conventional’ product they replace e.g. compact fluorescent light bulbs.
3. Climate change adaptation technology – products, systems or services that have been developed for application in scenarios where the consequences of climate change, such as increased average temperatures, rising sea levels or more frequent extreme weather events, have already begun to occur e.g.  sea water desalinisation plants to cope with water shortages and droughts.

This paper focuses on the second of these responses and looks at how engineering organisations are working to develop and implement tools and methods that support an eco design approach.

2. Why engineering design is key

Conventional responses to emerging carbon mitigation objectives and regulations have understandably focused on the compliance of existing products. One example is ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ (LCA) methods, which aim to produce an exhaustive summary of the environmental impacts of a product or processes. LCA methods are important in that they can support communication activities such as carbon labelling. However, they have a major limitation—they come late in the development cycle, or once it is completed. At best, they can feed into design of the next generation of product. And, even here, their use is limited because they are not designed to enable quick iteration on new design options.

To fully meet the challenge of carbon mitigation objectives and regulations, we must consider them from the early stages of design. A widely-used ‘rule of thumb’ is that 80% of a product’s environmental impact is built in during conceptual design phase. At this point, the designer has typically selected materials and manufacturing processes and defined the product lifecycle, fixing many of the environmental costs.

Considering environmental and regulatory issues throughout the design and development process, starting early, can therefore enable us to ‘design out’ carbon, cost and risk. The earlier, the better—identifying or avoiding a risk factor early in the process means fewer modifications, fewer failed stage-gate reviews, and thus fewer design iterations. But it is important to remember that environmental issues cannot be considered in isolation. Decisions that determine environmental costs also determine other vital properties of the product—its economic cost, speed, weight, appearance, manufacturability, and so on. So we need to embed data and tools to help make the right environmental decisions alongside or within the tools that support these other engineering choices. Foremost among these choices are those relating to materials and processes.

3. The role of material and process choices

Material and process choices play a key role in determining the life cycle carbon emissions associated with a product. For example, the ‘embodied carbon’ of the materials used in a product often make a significant contribution to an overall high life cycle impact. Selecting materials with a lower embodied carbon can help to reduce such impacts. Similarly, material adds weight, e.g., in an automobile, reducing fuel efficiency. Designers must trade-off lower weight against achieving the required mechanical properties (e.g., stiffness or strength) and cost. In such cases to reduce the life cycle carbon emissions of the product the designer must consider material properties such as density, cost, and relevant mechanical properties (strength, stiffness…) or ‘performance indices’ – formulae to optimize cost and mass per unit of stiffness or strength.

Of course, other factors (e.g., the location and design of production facilities or transportation to point-of-sale) also impact carbon emissions. But, for many products, materials and process decisions are dominant, so access to complete, trustworthy, up-to-date materials and process information is vital. These decisions are also central to other key aspects of the product that need to be optimized alongside environmental behavior—for example, cost or mechanical properties.

So materials and process decisions provide both a useful point at which to introduce carbon mitigation and regulatory considerations to the design and development process and a means to integrate these issues with broader product properties.

4. The Environmental Materials Information Technology Consortium

The Environmental Materials Information Technology (EMIT) Consortium is a collaborative project to develop and apply information technology solutions that enable product design and development in the context of carbon reduction objectives and regulations.

The EMIT Consortium, initiated by Granta Design,  currently involves 12 engineering  organisations, including NASA, Honeywell, Boeing, Emerson Electric and Eurocopter. EMIT member organisations have recognized the importance of the two principles of a successful eco design approach discussed previously, namely:

• Addressing carbon management and reduction issues is most effective when completed during the early stages of product development.
• Material and process choices are key to the reduction of life cycle carbon emissions.

The EMIT Consortium has specified a system to meet its objectives, building on a materials data manage platform:

• A ‘hub and spoke’ architecture, centered on a managed corporate material and process database, connected to the desktops of those throughout the enterprise who need to it;
• Specialist reference information and data structures covering materials, processes, restricted substances, critical and conflict materials, coatings, eco properties, and more;
• Tools for designers and engineers to apply this information in risk assessment and mitigation, design, and reporting—including tools embedded within key corporate systems (e.g, CAD, CAE, PLM).

At the end of its first five-year period, most of the system infrastructure, core data, and tools required for this system are in place. Members are already applying this technology in their design and development processes.

By providing designers and engineers with tools to quickly assess the life cycle carbon emissions of a product or system along with support for better material and process choices, the tools being developed within the EMIT consortium are enabling a more effective engineering approach to carbon mitigation and management. The oral presentation of this paper will provide further insights into the eco design approach and tools being developed by the EMIT Consortium members, and their experiences of applying them within engineering design practice.