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Eco Audit Tool
Environmental objectives are increasingly important in engineering and design. You may wish to limit the carbon footprint of your product, reduce its energy usage, limit wastes and emissions, or specify the manner of its disposal.
The Eco Audit Tool is an add-on tool to the CES Selector software tool that helps you to address such objectives. It enables a two-stage approach to eco design.
Stage 1. Eco auditing
Materials have a lifecycle (below). They are produced, manufactured into a product, used and—at the end of their life—recycled or discarded.
The product lifecycle
Environmental damage occurs at all four phases of the cycle. Eco design demands consideration of this full lifecycle impact. Before product designers can minimize this damage, they need a quick and effective means to estimate it and to focus their design efforts on the most significant life phases. But most approaches to such quantitative asessment (for example, Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, methods) are not designed for use as quick and practical design tools.
Inputs and outputs for the Eco Audit Tool
The Eco Audit Tool provides this capability. The process is illustrated above. Via a simple input form within the CES Selector user interface, the user enters information about product composition, processing, usage, transportation, and disposal. The tool then combines this with eco property data on the materials and processes used in the design. It estimates the energy usage and CO2 output resulting from each stage in the product lifecycle.
Eco Audit Tool results
Results are reported as graphs (above) and in tabular form, enabling further quantitative analysis. Generating this information early in the product design process helps to guide materials and process decisions when those decisions cost least and have the most impact.
In CES Selector 2012, this analysis has been extended, based on user feedback, to include the effects of manufacturing waste and secondary processing (such as machining, joining, and finishing). Options have also been added to better account for common electronic components. Variations in materials recovery at the end of the product's life. These changes make the tool better-aligned with real-world manufacturing scenarios and the PAS 2050 carbon footprinting standard, without sacrificing its speed and ease-of-use.
Stage 2. Optimizing eco impact—selection and substitution
Knowing which phases in the lifecycle of a product design will make the most significant contribution to its environmental impact helps to guide the design strategy by which that impact is minimized.
Guiding materials selection and substitution strategies with eco audit results
The diagram illustrates this process. For example, if the materials production phase dominates, you might seek to identify materials that fulfil the same engineering function but have a lower embodied energy. If the use phase dominates in a product that moves, you may focus on selecting materials with a lower mass.
Whatever your objective, CES Selector is the ideal tool for analyzing materials alternatives. You can plot engineering, economic, and environmental properties—or combinations of them—against each other. And you can rank materials against a specific design objective. CES Selector aids selection decisions—for example, find the material that represents the best trade off between two conflicting objectives. And it helps with materials substitution—for example, to find materials that have a similar engineering performance to the material in current use, but a lower environmental footrprint.
A selection study using CES Selector—studying a panel and comparing the embodied energy per unit of bending stiffness with the mass per unit of bending stiffness. A designer can trade-off between two objectives.
A practical eco design solution
Having identified a possible material or process, designers can quickly apply the Eco Audit Tool again to ensure that proposed changes made to reduce environmental impact in one part of the lifecycle are not outweighed by negative effects elsewhere. The Eco Audit Tool and CES Selector, drawing on the Eco MaterialUniverse data module, thus provide a very practical eco design solution for use within the design process.