Lesson2: Green Design and LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)

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From the course by University of Colorado System

More on Change and Sustainability

8 ratings

University of Colorado System

More on Change and Sustainability

8 ratings

Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent

This is Class 2 of the MOOC Specialization, Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent. In this class you will learn more change agent skills and hear from people who have made changes in their organizations. You will also learn more about green design and sustainability reporting. The skills from this class will help improve products and services in your company or help the company issue its first, or an improved sustainability report.

From the lesson

Green Design

IntroductionThis module introduces the key ideas of green design or design for the environment (DfE). The design phase of a product or building usually only absorbs a small fraction of the entire budget, but determines the product's or building's impact for years to come. Therefore, getting design right is crucial to achieving sustainability. Once your company has designed and developed a good product you need to convey that to consumers. We talk about labeling as one means of doing this. We also discuss problems with 'greenwashing' or over-stating a product's green attributes. In this module we introduce Life-Cycle Assessment (sometimes Life-Cycle Analysis or LCA). This is a powerful tool for identifying where a product's major impact comes from, which allows the company to redesign targeting those high impact areas. Next week we practice doing an LCA.

Lesson 1: Green Design Principles8:21

Lesson2: Green Design and LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)10:53

Lesson 3: Labels & Certification7:38

Lesson 4: Advertising and Greenwashing9:58

Lesson 5: Doing an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)12:05

Michelle Reott - The Importance of Design15:38

Meet the Instructors

John Byrd
Senior Instructor
Managing for Sustainable & Finance
Kenneth Bettenhausen
Professor
Management

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.

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.

Now, it's worth noting that Apple has a lot more control over how it designs its

products, than over the factories where they're made, in China or Taiwan.

It can exert some control over those factories, but

it exerts 100% control over design.

The life cycle assessment helps us identify

where the greatest impact might be.

Now, right up front, I want to warn you that life cycle assessment is

not a perfect tool, and here's the problem.

A life cycle assessment will tell us about material use, water use,

energy use, air pollution, water pollution, carbon emissions and so on.

But it doesn't tell us whether the water pollution

is more harmful than the air pollution or the chemicals in the materials.

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.

That's for new or virgin paper made entirely from pulp wood,

with no recycled content whatsoever.

The middle column is for paper with 30% post-consumer content.

So that's 30% recycle content.

And the right column is for paper made entirely from recycled or

post-consumer waste.

100% post consumer content.

As you scan this content, it's almost a no-brainer that more recycled content

reduces the environmental impact.

The next five measures also favor recycled paper except for the one category,

called, chemical oxygen demand.

I looked at another source and it suggested that recycled paper

should have a lower chemical oxygen demand than new paper.

So this result might not be quite correct.

Chemical oxygen demand has something to do with

organic material in the wastewater from paper mills.

Now, it's easy to make this sustainability case that your company should

use copy paper with 100% post consumer content.

Why don't all companies do this?

Well there's a price difference.

I did a very unscientific survey and found that the difference in price

between paper with 30% post-consumer content, and

paper with 50% was about $4.50 a case, that's about 45 cents a ream.

And between 50% post-consumer content and

100%, it was about $6.75 a case.

A company buying at quantity could get better prices than the ones I found at

Amazon and Staples.

So the decision really becomes, how much is your company willing to pay for

reducing its impact on the environment?

And secondarily, can this good behavior enhance the company's reputation?

We might be willing to spend a little extra if there were benefits elsewhere.

Now, here's another example.

This study compares cotton to polyester clothing, say a tee shirt.

Here's a video of the article to show you the level of detail that

a life cycle assessment can require.

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.

If I understand it properly, this weight of thread, weighs

70 grams per 10,000 meters of length, so it's pretty thin thread.

From the graph, you can see that cotton, on the left,

has the highest total environmental cost, largely because of growing the cotton and

turning it into yarn.

This is per kilogram so an acrylic or nylon shirt weighs less than a cotton

shirt, the difference will be even more pronounced on a shirt by shirt basis.

But let me end by showing you a clip from a wonderful TED talk by

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.

It also shows you, the work that Layla did,

that sometimes we just have to be clever to figure out where the highest impact is?

Next, we're going to talk about labels, and

how to convey the good work that you're doing to your customers?

Thanks

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