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We talked about some design principles.
Less material, more recycled material, pay attention to energy and water use and
carbon emissions.
Don't use toxic or dangerous materials.
But applying these principles requires knowing what and
where the product makes its biggest impacts.
To figure this out, we circle back to life cycle thinking.
I'm going to introduce life cycle analysis or life cycle assessment.
Till fairly recently, doing a life cycle assessment was incredibly difficult.
It required a chemical engineer and probably other experts.
Today, there's some online resources that allow non-engineers to complete a pretty
reasonable life cycle assessment.
There are also a lot of online resources for completed
life cycle assessments that you might be able to adapt to your particular need.
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Why is life cycle assessment important?
The sad truth is that your company cannot probably make the perfect product.
To try to create a product with zero or
near-zero impact along every dimension is just too expensive.
So instead, we look for the places with the greatest impact.
Then, we work on improving those areas.
Here's an example from Apple, in about 2009,
Apple published this product life cycle information on its website.
It shows that product use had 53% of
the impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
By 2012, the company worked on reducing the energy on its computers and
phones used and the proportion was about equivalent to the manufacturing phase.
Over this time, the greenhouse emissions per product were going down, so
the second picture doesn't mean manufacturing was getting dirtier.
This is a case where a company found out which life cycle phase was having a big
impact, and worked to reduce it.
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Sometimes these comparisons are very hard to make across different impacts.
Sometimes a trade-off depends on the importance of certain impacts today.
What's current or urgent or on people's minds or where your factory is located or
who's using your products like kids or new moms.
People doing these types of analyses understand this problem.
And they've been working on computing a single life cycle assessment score.
There are a few of these that have come out recently.
One is an app called item map and it works pretty well.
I'll show you an example of one of these in just a minute.
Let's look at the results of a lifecycle assessment.
This one is fairly simple.
It also shows one of the best uses of life cycle analysis
comparing products that do the same function.
Here we're looking at standard copy or
printer paper with different amounts of post consumer content.
The table shows ten different measures.
There are another five measures that didn't fit on this page and
I'll show you those in just a second.
Each of the columns shows the environmental impact of producing one ton
of paper.
The baseline is in the left column of numbers.
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There are simpler approaches, but this article is fairly typical for
a standard life cycle assessment.
The study uses something called eco-costs to arrive at a single number,
to compare the different fabrics.
Eco-costs are the costs associated with preventing a damage.
Now, they're computed in Euros.
In this example, because every few years a group in Europe,
I think it's at Delft University, adjusts the cost for different impacts.
Japan has a very similar data system.
The 70-dtex,
in the corner, refers to the density of the thread used to weave the fabric.
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It helps us remember that the life cycle impact
could be somewhere besides all the chemical and energy data that we collect.
A link to the full TED talk is posted.
>> Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle,
which I found out that you guys don't really,
you don't do tea kettles in this country really, do you?
But that's really big in the UK.
97% of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle.
So they're very popular.
And if I were to work with a design firm, or a designer and they were
designing one of these and they wanted to do it eco, they'd ask me two things.
They'd say, Leila, how do I make it technically efficient,
because obviously energy's a problem with this product.
Well, how do I make it green materials?
How do I make the materials green, in the manufacturing?
Would you ask me those questions?
They seem logical, right?
Yeah, well I'd say, you're looking at the wrong problems,
because the problem is with use.
With how people use the product?
65% of Brits admit to over filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea.
All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy and
its been calculated.
That in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles,
is enough to light all of the street lights in England for a night.
>> Wow.
>> But this is the thing, right?
This is what I call a product-person failure, but we've got a product-system
failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous.
You don't even notice they're there.
And this guy over here though he does, his name Simon.
Simon works for the National Electricity Company in the UK.
He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming
into the system, to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes.
He's also watching television.
The reason is is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the UK.
The moment that very popular TV shows end, the minute the ad break comes on,
this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France,
because everybody turns on their kettles at the same time.
>> [LAUGH] >> 1.5 million
kettles seriously problematic.
So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve this
system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system.
Just because the product hasn't thought about the problem,
that it's going to have when it exist in the world.
Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market and found,
the minimum fill lines,
the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there,
was between two and five and a half cups of water, just to make one cup of tea.
Now, this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs.
One's a boiling chamber and one's the water holder.
The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled.
Which means because they're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need.
And this is what I call behavior changing products.
Products, systems, or services that intervene and
solve these problems up front.
>> This gives you an introduction to life cycle assessment.
John ByrdSenior Instructor
Kenneth BettenhausenProfessor
