Page 189 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

168 Cha pte r Ni ne

Criteria-Based Checklists
The simplest and most widely used qualitative assessment tool is
a checklist of criteria, stated in the form of questions or points to
consider. The use of checklists is often one of the first DFE initia-
tives undertaken by product development organizations because
they require only modest resources to update and maintain and are
easy to understand and implement. There are several different vari-
eties of checklists:
• Material selection criteria—Perhaps the most common DFE
check list approach is a list of materials to be consulted by

design engineers when specifying parts or ingredients (an
example is the Greenlist™ process developed by SC Johnson,
described in Chapter 8). This can take two forms—a list of
preferred materials based on environmental considerations, or
a list of materials to be avoided because of regulatory restric-
tions and environmental concerns.
• Supplier selection criteria—The environmental “footprint”
of a product or process is determined by the material and
energy flows that characterize its life cycle. For example,
automobiles and computers are assembled from a variety
of components that typically are manufactured by one set
of suppliers and recovered or recycled by another set of con-
tractors. Companies that are highly leveraged in this way
have begun to review the environmental performance char-
acteristics of their suppliers and contractors. For example,
as described in Chapter 11, worldwide electronics manufac-
turers have adopted a standardized supplier assessment tool
that is based on the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct.
• Product or process design criteria—Design checklists are
essentially a formalization of guidelines like the ones dis-
cussed in Chapter 8. They usually consist of a series of ques-
tions or criteria that address specific DFE considerations
and are applied as a form of design review. The best time to
use such checklists, of course, is during the concept develop-
ment stage, but they are also useful as part of a milestone
review to assure that the product team has considered rele-
vant environmental concerns.

Despite their advantages, checklists do have important limitations:
• Checklists are qualitative in nature, even though it is pos-
sible to compute numeric scores. This means that they pro-
vide only crude measures of performance improvement. For
example, a supplier checklist might pose the question “Do
you have a waste minimization program?” A simple answer