1996 Electronics Industry Environmental Roadmap - Civil and ...

Design for Environment: Evolution and Tool Needs
environmental protection and economics. As described in Green Gold, industrial and
governmental players see green processes and products as economic policy, not environmental
policy [18].
The successful application of DFE to electronic systems requires the coordination of several design-
and data-based activities, such as environmental impact metrics; data and data
management; design optimization, including cost assessments; and others. Failure to address any
of the aspects may limit the effectiveness and usefulness of DFE efforts. As discussed in the
1994 Roadmap, three elements are key to integrating DFE into a product-development process:
(1) eco-efficiency metrics, which are necessary for measuring environmental performance; (2)
eco-efficient design practices, which are implemented during the design process; and (3) ecoefficiency
analysis methods, which enable proposed designs to be assessed with respect to
environmental metrics, costs, and quality tradeoffs. An extensive discussion of these elements is
available in Joseph Fiksel’s Design for Environment: Creating Eco-Efficient Products and
Processes [17]. This report focuses on metrics, although practices and analysis methods are
touched upon.
The concept of “eco-efficiency” was discussed by Stephan Schmidheiny with the Business
Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) [19] in the context of limits to growth being due
to the ability of an ecosystem to absorb waste, rather than solely due to limited resources. This
belief encourages a shift from compliance to pollution avoidance and to more efficient processes.
Further defining the concept in terms of its direct applicability to industrial concerns, Fiksel
states that eco-efficiency is “the ability of a managed entity to simultaneously meet cost, quality,
and performance goals, reduce environmental impacts, and conserve valuable resources…” ([17],
p. 499).
In order to attain an eco-efficient process, which is central to DFE, the entity must define the
metrics by which to measure the efficiency. Such metrics include: energy (e.g., total energy consumed
during the product’s life cycle), emissions (e.g., toxic or hazardous materials used in production,
hazardous waste generated during production or use), materials management (e.g., percentage
of recycled materials used as input to product, purity of recyclable materials recovered),
or economic (e.g., cost savings associated with design improvements, average life cycle cost
incurred by the manufacturer). 5
Practices adopted in industry to implement DFE, and the analysis methods employed to assess
the impact—realized or estimated—of a new design, rely on the establishment of metrics. Some
common DFE practices, such as material substitution, and design for X (where X is separability,
disassembly, recyclability, disposability, re-usability, remanufacture, energy recovery, etc.),
cannot be successfully carried out in the absence of a reliable means of measuring the impact of
the decision. The analysis of the design, whether quantitative or qualitative, also rests on a
foundation of metrics. After metrics have been established and practices implemented, analyses
might be carried out based on product design, life-cycle assessment, chemical-use mapping,
product cost, and time-to-market, among others. 6
5 For a more detailed discussion of metrics, refer to [15], pp. 20-21.
6 For a more detailed discussion of practices and analysis methods, refer to [15], pp. 22-24.
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