Sustainability
“...we tend to apply other types of frameworks and see standards as a minimum requirement. We don’t see them as the solution, but as part of the overall approach.”
are going, the market, and the people you are trying to sell to, is going to start dying because the world is going to be piling up with rubbish.’ Their response? ‘Oh, that’s in 20 years’ time and for the government to do something about.’ Only a few companies and a few organisations understand the message and the reasoning, are actually going to do anything about it and are willing to accept it. They grab BS 8887-1 with both hands saying ‘this is great, this is the sort of information we need and can we have more of it!’”
Even if EoL product does not have an immediate financial value, there can be other advantages to take-back schemes. An engineering manager responsible for railway track equipment acknowledged: “If we want to do effective product development for the next generation, it is necessary to know what is going wrong with the product currently being made. The value of returned product is in determining the reason for failure.”
Key stages New product development begins with the ‘market’ because if there is no demand for a product or the service that it provides, then it cannot be a commercial success.
In the second stage, a ‘specification’ detailing design engineering requirements and product attributes, is written. These requirements would be established through market research. Relevant standards and legislation to be complied with are also
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stipulated. For manufacturers supplying to industry, specification requirements often come from their customers, as highlighted in an interview with a marine engineering company: “Anything that is supplied as a bespoke service will be dictated by the customer. Sometimes it is necessary to go back to various international customers and explain why certain stipulations can’t be complied with because the legislation in the country of origin is slightly different. Normally, a company would dictate that we work to whichever standard is the highest.”
The specification is used as a reference for ‘concept design’. Drawings and models of the most promising concepts are evaluated with the client or members of the target market audience before moving forward to ‘detail design’. “A clear fixed picture of the specification is developed so there will be certainty about what it is that we are supposed to be delivering. The project will then move to ‘specific design’, where it will be fleshed out in its final form. It is at this point that standards are often applied and health and safety requirements met.” At the detailed design stage the chosen concept is optimised for ‘manufacture’. The danger is that when substantial changes are made to a design late in the process, they tend to be very costly and should be avoided if possible.
The design output is the technical product specification (TPS), which drives the manufacturing activity. Production engineers
are limited in how much they can improve a product by the position they occupy within the development process. A quality consultant said: “It all starts with design. By the time a product goes to manufacture the impacts are a given, they are set. With design for EoL and recyclability, or any other environmental impacts, the manufacturer will be stuck with them.”
The last stage is ‘sales’. Money and profit is fed back into the system from customers, thus providing income for the retailers, distributors, manufacturers, designers and investors. Design and manufacture are integral functions of the highly interdependent national and global economy. Today the process should not end there, producers of manufactured goods must also plan EoL product strategies.
Information is power In part, the challenge of sustainable design is in capturing in writing, the information pertinent to all user requirements and product attributes.
The representation of the design process in figure 3 illustrates information transfer down through each stage to the next. It also shows inputs from multiple sources entering the process as required. In addition to the information flows represented, ideas and problems encountered are fed back to earlier functions, so that designs can be updated and improved in light of
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