Page 109 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

88 Cha pte r Six

commonplace, eco-efficient companies are gaining advantages in
penetrating new markets and increasing their share of existing mar-
kets. Chapter 7 provides examples of eco-efficiency performance indi-
cators that companies have used to establish design objectives and
criteria. A common approach toward measuring eco-efficiency is to
take the ratio of value produced, including products and by-products,
to resources consumed; for example, sales per BTU of energy.
While the logic of eco-efficiency is compelling, a caveat is in order.
If the concept is applied too narrowly, companies can simply improve
eco-efficiency by gradually decreasing their waste generation or re -
source use, and may become complacent about incremental achieve-
ments that do not substantially benefit the overall systems in which
they operate. As outlined in Chapter 1, the challenge of reversing cur-
rent environmental trends is enormous. Rather than just managing
resource intensity with conventional products, companies should keep
in mind the “value” side of the equation, and try to design innova-
tive, game-changing products that provide significant improvements
in quality of life and/or quantum reductions in their environmental
footprint.
Even more radical is the notion that designers should try to
enlarge the “positive” footprint by seeking restorative and beneficial
impacts upon the environment. For example, Bill McDonough and
Michael Braungart have hypothesized a “nutrivehicle” that cleanses
the air by trapping pollutants and captures its own emissions for
conversion into useful by-products [2]. They prefer to design for eco-
effectiveness—i.e., doing more good rather than less bad and working
in harmony with natural systems. In their “cradle to cradle” model,
waste becomes “food,” either entering the environment as “biologi-
cal nutrients” or recirculating in industrial systems as “technical
nutrients.” This type of transformative innovation is actually begin-
ning to take shape in some of the industrial ecology examples dis-
cussed later in this chapter (see DFE Principle 7).

Indicators and Metrics

DFE Principle 3. Select appropriate metrics to represent
product life-cycle performance.
To guide product development decisions, identify key environmental per-
formance indicators and metrics that are aligned with evolving customer
needs and corporate sustainability goals. As described in Chapter 5, per-
formance measurement is a critical element of new product develop-
ment because it assures that the product will meet a variety of
customer requirements as well as corporate priorities and regulatory
constraints. The choice of high-level environmental indicators is
extremely important, in that it determines what types of signals are
sent to engineering and manufacturing staff responsible for meeting