May 11-13 1999-06-01 Danvers, Massachusetts
Introduction
The 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment (ISEE) was the seventh annual conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. and the Computer Society. The conference attracts many of the leading electronic/electrical companies and professionals in design for the environment, pollution prevention and environmental policy fields from all over the world. The conference organisers believe that the electronics industry is a leader in improving industrial environmental performance. It is for this reason the event is considered to be a bench mark conference for other industries.
This year’s conference theme was "Business Success through Environmental Integration." One of the weaknesses of the conference is also one of its strengths. Due to the heavy industrial attendance the presentations were sometimes used as a PR platform therefore only allowing a small amount of time to actually talk about DfE implementation within companies. It would be nice to see at the next symposium companies who have previously addressed DfE implementation demonstrating how their views were changing with increasing experience.
The main interest for many delegates concerned end-of-life issues in the light of pending legislation. Many of the sessions focussed upon this theme and were heavily attended. This major preoccupation was due to National Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directives that are being developed in response to pending European WEEE. Currently the Netherlands have implemented a national legislation and Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany are all heavily involved with implementing national legislation. America can see that this from of producer responsibility will impact America and will need to be addressed on an international level. In addition, US national legislation is also being considered.
Whilst there was a heavy focus on process issues specifically associated with end-of-life management, there was also an interest in more long-term issues. The concept of sustainability was featured in several presentations. This demonstrated that although progress is being made, it is recognised by academic and NGOs that industry still needs to be continually improving.
In the following report an overview of the conference is presented. Suggestions for the cross-sectoral relevance of the conference papers is also discussed.
The first day of the symposium began with a series of four tutorials on Environmental Design Tools, Product Labelling, Supply Chain Partnerships and Sustainable Development.
Partnerships along the supply chain
This tutorial discussed some of the issues associated with end-of-life management and was extremely popular suggesting that it is a current concern with many of the attending companies.
There is a move within the electronics sector to lease products or services. The customer benefits from leasing by being able to update their systems. The OEMs benefit from such a partnership by maintaining customer loyalty and also maintaining control of the products at the end-of-life. However, to make this leasing programme financially viable to the OEMs it is favourable to shorten the terms of the lease therefore making the computer equipment more valuable at the end-of-life. Examples of collection schemes in operation were presented and other practical issues such as collection schemes, prepaid shipping and the finances of such schemes were also discussed.
Sustainable Business
This session looked at the concept of a sustainable business and encouraged some excellent debate. The tutorial was ran by Ulrich Goluke and Karen Lange who work for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). It has been recognised that the western market has become saturated with certain products (for example the telephone) and many managers are beginning to ask the question what will happen next. Within the group it was discussed how idea generation would be the key to the future and that this would result in more intelligence per unit, described as "Life Cycle Intelligence."
It was commented that Life Cycle inventories and LCAs were extremely resource intensive and do not presently encourage life cycle thinking further up the supply chain. Other industrial representatives supported this view. It was identified by the group that the OEM had the power to push life cycle initiatives through the supply chain. The taxing of raw materials, increasing policy and encouraging consumer demand were methods proposed to encourage OEMs to instigate change. It was felt that the reward of being the first to market with an ecodesign solution was not necessarily financially viable. Many in the tutorial felt that being second to the market was superior.
The group felt that eco-awareness was not yet at the decision-makers level and that often the product stewards and DfE implementers were "operating on a sound frequency not heard by the human ear." This has been a problem faced by all industries. It was hoped that the shift to multifunctional teamworking would help to overcome this problem.
The discussion explored how industry could move to a more sustainable future, moving from the linear to the cyclic. The group identified gaps of knowledge and what improvements were necessary if companies were to move towards a sustainable future. Many points were raised but the key areas identified were:
provide comparable measurements
establish how to measure the environmental impact of the service sectors
create reward mechanisms for industry and individuals to change
encourage greater dialogue throughout the supply chain and the art of active listening
find efficient ways of capturing the environmental requirements of
the consumer and suppliers
The keynote speaker for the symposium was Carl Frankel who is considered to be one of the United States’ leading authorities on business and sustainable development and is the US Editor for the Tomorrow publication. His presentation looked at the challenge of alignment. He discussed how educational and corporate institutions; structures of Governance; and the nature of the environmental problem needed to be aligned to allow environmental progress to be made. He stressed sustainable business was beyond the three E’s (Environment, Economics and Equity): it was a system problem. He claimed that engineers failed to address "systems" and therefore a sustainable business required the involvement of all relevant parties.
Frankel presented three dimensions of sustainability:
Discourse
Community
Consciousness
The following model was to illustrate how sustainability would evolve. The first circle "The Fix" represents where technology is applied and developed. This is the area which industry is presently addressing. The next circle represents "The Conversation," this is where stakeholders are involved and engaged in the risk assessment. The last circle, "The Story" represents when values and ethics are introduced which are necessary to instigate change.
Towards an Integrated Model of Sustainability
Eighteen technical sessions were run in three parallel sessions covering DfE management integration, product stewardship, environmental strategies and design innovations integration. A review is provided for those sessions attended.
United Technologies Corporation presented a very informative paper emphasising the need for environmental experts and engineers to communicate more effectively. Tomas Swarr suggested that within his company waste minimisation and pollution prevention had been more successfully addressed because these areas focussed on the manufacturing departments. DfE was considered to be more difficult for the company to address because it requires multi-functional dialogue. United Technologies decided that to overcome this problem environmental, health and safety (EHS) risk assessments would be conducted at a product level and integrated within the company’s business plan. It was recognised that product assessments would be most beneficial to the company if conducted during the planning stages to enable changes to be implemented effectively.
"Design for X" workshops were conducted to implement the new strategy and to encourage active participation. Training sessions were not considered to encourage interaction and therefore not inline with the DfE integration objectives. The product team hosted the workshops and EHS experts provided technical support. The sessions were facilitated to ensure specific project guidance and encourage open communication. The group used process mapping to identify the EHS aspects that assisted in identifying the product assessment criteria.
The workshop sessions identified that the product team would have to increase their knowledge of United Technologies product range to exploit material inputs and also potential recovery from product take back. Event trees and life cycle Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) were identified as support tools which could be potentially beneficial to the projects. The EHS experts within the company decided that they should not reinvent the quality systems but rather inject modules into the existing quality system. The company is presently working on integrating the terminology used by EHS and Design to aid communication. This is felt to be extremely important if EHS is to become a corporate function. However, an issue which United Technology is still addressing is how to ensure that DfE is integrated at the same level as Health & Safety.
Dupont presented their vision of sustainable growth. The following quote is used within the company:
"Sustainable growth involves creating shareholder and societal value whilst decreasing the "footprint" along the value chain."
Sustainable Growth in Dupont
Paul Tebo went on to say that Dupont do not presently know how to measure societal value. This is a problem that the environmental sector still needs to address. He went on to provide some product examples which Dupont are currently working on. This included the ‘Chameleon paint ranges’ which is a paint system for cars, which changes depending upon the light conditions. In the future this process will be controlled by computer chips, therefore enabling the car to be changed to meet fashion requirements. This same chip could also be used for house interiors and exteriors. Another product, which the company is also researching, is polyester made from natural sources. The company has created one part of the monomer but this still requires further studies.
IBM have developed a DfE methodology to be able to benchmark the companies project portfolio and measure DfE effectiveness. This system will make all future IBM projects comparable. This rating assessment programme functions as part of IBM’s Lotus Notes-based Product Environmental Profile System. The company has also used workshop activities to aid dissemination. Workshops have been found to be a very effective awareness raising tool and the company now take designers and engineers to disassembly plants to illustrate end-of-life issues.
Rank Xerox is trying to change design culture through experimental environmental training. Rank Xerox also use hands on workshops and group activities to raise environmental awareness. One of the DfE initiatives involved taking employees on a week trip to Mexico to explore self-actualisation and to encourage the work force to be environmentally driven. The company believe that it is necessary to keep environmental issues at the forefront and try to encourage this by holding "Earth days" annually. It has been crucial to the company that all environmental initiatives have had the complete buy-in from the management at every stage.
One of the more forward thinking presentations was from A Jansen, from
Delft University, investigating the potential of human power as a sustainable option for
electronics. This appears to be a major opportunity for future products if consumer
prejudices are successfully overcome.
An important aspect, which was raised during a panel session investigating successful strategies for managing DfE, was the difficulty of imposing change down the supply chain. A representative from Texas Instruments discussed how, as a supplier to an OEM, the destiny of the parts was not controlled by Texas Instruments but by the OEM (Ford). This is a similar situation for many companies. Texas Instruments have tried to overcome this problem by inviting suppliers, customers and stakeholders into the QFD Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process. However it has been found that many of the involved companies have yet to establish DfE business plans and this complicates the process.
The following diagram illustrates the EHS involvement in Texas Instruments new product development. It was interesting to learn that the product development teams decided that it was necessary for EHS to be allocated a specific assessment gate.
EHS involvement in Texas Instruments product development
This section of the report looks at the different types of DfE tools and techniques that were presented at the conference. The tools are used to assist in integrating DfE into the product development process. Many of the DfE tools and techniques presented by the companies were based around qualitative and quantitative matrices. These ranged in complexity however all were tailored to the individual company's specific needs. Some of these matrices also plotted customer concern. Other product benchmarking DfE analysis tools were explored by other companies such as the use of design decision support tools (QFD and FMEA) Companies were also encouraged, when conducting market research, to include a DfE analysis of competitors products services and systems (Knight & Dewhurst 1999).
End-of-life issues were of great interest at this conference and a software tool called the Disassembly Effort Index (DEI) developed by the Multi-lifecycle Engineering Research Centre (MERC) focussed solely on the economic analysis of the disassembly activity. The tool has calculated the disassembly times for products and subassemblies and is designed to be used during the design stages to ensure end-of-life options are considered effectively. The tool starts with a bill of materials and then various disassembly processes are explored including listing re-saleable parts. Scores are created to enable the most economical disassembly route to be selected. This information can then be provided during asset recovery.
There appears to have been a move from LCA to input/output analysis. The Economic Input-Output-Based Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) method has been developed by Carnegie Mellon University. This technique involves augmenting economic input-output tables with sectoral environmental impact indices primarily related to air pollution. This produces a result that can analyse economy-wide environmental impact. The textile industry is a large US industrial sector and therefore there are large quantities of economic data however these are generic and US specific. A software package has been developed which enables time-effective assessments to be made. A key feature of this tool is that it does not link the outputs (i.e. emissions) to environmental impacts, it does instead just illustrate those that are the greatest. This is useful in terms of quickly getting a result but has its drawbacks in that the largest emission may not result in the largest environmental impact, therefore effort may be spent reducing something which has little or no effect on the environment.
IBM have established a software based tool which is called Product Environmental Profile System (PEP) this requires that the product development teams have to document the environmental characteristics of their product. This system enables other IBM product development teams to gain access to potentially useful information across multiple IBM locations.
Ecobilan were demonstrating Environmental
Information and Management Explorer (EIME). This tool is currently used by many of the
leading electronic/electrical companies. This tool contains a life cycle inventory
database applicable to the electronics sector. The main difference this tool has over
other LCA software packages is that the client/server architecture promotes company wide
integration and the sharing of knowledge between different collaborators in the design
process. The company’s environmental expert, who predetermines the internal and
regulatory product development guidelines relevant to the company, monitors the EIME
database. This information is included in pop-up windows when used by the product
development team therefore ensuring guidelines are met and also raising the teams
environmental awareness. Ecobilan are exploring how predetermined parties involved in the
product supply chain could also use the environmental expert aspect of the software tool.
This would mean that supplier data could be contained in one database. This tool brings
together the concepts of concurrent product development and DfE however the database is
sector specific and therefore a relevant tool for the textile sector in line with E-Co
Challenge findings however there is currently no valid data.
From the perspective of the Textile/Clothing sector, this conference can be seen as an opportunity to exploit the information and communication systems that have already been developed within the electronic/electrical sector.
The presenters and delegates believed that the electronics and electrical sector has conducted the most extensive DfE effort out of all the industrial sectors.Many companies talked about the use of environmental champions during product development and how using these champions design guidelines could be adapted and modified. IBM commented upon how they had included the marketing department in product development to establish the environmental labelling needs of the future products. This was found to be very beneficial. There were many presentations that identified the need for multifunctional communication and the benefits of working in teams. The electronics sector, like the textile sector, has focused upon manufacturing pollution prevention. They now appreciate that DfE is a challenge that requires a team effort if problems are to be addressed effectively. There is recognition that the environment is not just the responsibility of manufacturing and requires system thinking.
Workshops were used repeatedly to integrate DfE into product development. The workshops proved to be successful because they created a platform for discussion and also enabled effective progress to be made by producing new company product development models.
Although there are gaps of eco-knowledge in the electronics sector, enough data has been collected to enable progress to be made. This demonstrates that it is not necessary to have extensive databases to make substantially improved products/services. The matrix tools presented at ISEE are adaptable to the textile and clothing sector because the focus was both qualitative and quantitative enabling educated guesses to be of value. As environmental textile related data is collected there is software available, such as EIME, which can be used to store and improve environmental communication within the product development teams.
John Ehrenfeld, from MIT, made the point that the electronics sector has a new challenge. The challenge is to design information and communication technology for the future which brings about a shift in the underlying social structures. These systems should produce a more explicit sense of ‘responsibility’, and to also bring about a shift in the mode of social living from ‘having’ to ‘being’. This therefore gives the textile sector a new challenge to ensure they monitor the changes in social systems, as any move from people wanting to own products will have an enormous effect on them. They therefore have the chance to prepare for this change.
The ever increasing progress in IT development needs to be monitored by the textile sector to maximise progress.
Report written by Hannah Curtis,
June 1999.