Page 146 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

Design Rules and Guidelines 125

for products. These techniques are complemented by other DFE prac-
tices, such as recovering value from obsolete or discarded products
(see Section C, Design for Revalorization).

A.1 Design for Energy and Material Conservation
Reducing energy and material consumption is the most direct way to
improve eco-efficiency, i.e., utilizing fewer resources to deliver equiv-
alent or greater value. As discussed in Chapter 4, decreasing resource
intensity results in higher resource productivity, provides immediate
reductions in operating costs, and, thus, is synergistic with business
goals. In other words, the quantity and costs of purchased energy and
materials are reduced by increasing operating efficiency (see Section
D.3, Design for Economic Capital). Moreover, energy conservation
reduces overall material consumption in the supply chain, since gen-
erating energy requires some type of fuel and/or equipment. Although
energy management is often pursued as a separate program, energy
and material resource conservation should, ideally, go hand-in-hand.
Finally, energy conservation that reduces fossil fuel use will also reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (see Section D.2, Design for Natural Capital).

Life-Cycle Resource Intensity Reduction
As stated in Chapter 6, DFE needs to consider the full life cycle of a
product, including all of the processes involved in sourcing, produc-
tion, distribution, use, and recovery of the product. Thus, the investi-
gation of opportunities for energy and material conservation should
consider both supplier and customer processes. Depending on geo-
graphic locations and type of facilities, certain companies in the
supply chain may have much better opportunities than others for
energy and material conservation. The following types of opportu-
nities should be explored:

• Reduce the procurement footprint—Many companies have
begun to examine the environmental practices of their sup-
pliers and encourage greater energy and material efficiency.
This can reduce the life-cycle footprint of their own products
and potentially lower their costs. The most prominent example
is Wal-Mart, which has developed sustainability scorecards
for packaging and energy use and is requesting environ-
mental performance improvements from all of its suppliers
(see Chapter 19). This exercise goes beyond measuring direct
energy and material consumption. See Chapter 9 for a discus-
sion of the challenge of understanding a company’s full life-
cycle carbon footprint.
• Reduce the operational resource footprint—Companies have
found a great deal of “low-hanging fruit” by tightening up