Page 343 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

318 Cha pte r Se v e ntee n

For the five recommended KPIs in Table 17.2, a baseline assess-
ment was performed of the current industry status. Based on a lim-
ited sample of company-supplied data, together with literature-based
research, a range of values was estimated for each indicator. Note that
there was considerable variability in the data due to both differences
in company performance and differences in boundary definition for
the metrics. While these ranges hardly constitute a precise baseline,
they provided a foundation for individual companies to initiate
benchmarking, stakeholder dialogue, and establishment of improve-
ment targets.

Owens Corning: A Passion for Environmental Excellence
Organizing for Sustainability
Owens Corning is a leading global producer of residential and com-
mercial building materials including insulation and roofing, as well
as glass fiber reinforcements and engineered materials for composite
systems. Founded in 1938, Owens Corning is a market-leading inno-
vator of glass fiber technology with sales of $5 billion in 2007 and
18,000 employees in 26 countries on five continents. Owens Corning
is committed to driving enterprise sustainability through three major
strategies [7]:
1. Greening its operations by reducing their environmental
footprint
2. Greening its products by continuously improving their
life-cycle impact
3. Accelerating energy efficiency improvements in the built
environment.
In 2007, Owens Corning established a Corporate Sustainability
group to manage its enterprise-wide sustainability initiatives. Accord-
ing to Chief Sustainability Officer Frank O’Brien-Bernini, “Energy
efficiency is a fundamental part of our approach to sustainability.”
This makes business sense, since rising energy prices will make
insulation technologies increasingly important in the construction
industry. The amount of energy used in manufacturing insulation is
recouped within about four to five weeks of product use in a typical
building. That’s a pretty impressive payback. Moreover, a study by
The Ohio State University estimated that the life-cycle environmen-
tal benefits of insulation, in terms of avoided natural resource im -
pacts of energy production, are about 1000 times greater than the
impacts of producing the insulation [8].
Today, Owens Corning uses only 9% of the energy needed 50
years ago to melt glass for its insulation and glass reinforcement
products, and uses about 55% less raw materials to produce the same