Sustainability


The MADE Concept In the UK, the main manufacturing standard is BS 8887-1 (2006), which has its origins in PD 6470 (1975). This standard was entitled ‘The Management of Design for Economic Production’.


The TDW/4/7 committee of the British Standards Institution (BSI) decided to take a holistic view of design. The new standard has an equal emphasis on each stage of the product life-cycle, including production and what happens after use. The result is BS 8887 ‘Design for Manufacture, Assembly, Disassembly and End-of-life processing (MADE)’. As BS 8887-1 is ‘Part 1’ of the series, it is the entry standard or foundation from which others follow.


BS 8887 did not start as a sustainable design standard. It is concerned with the way in which documentation produced by designers, using BS 8888, is used. The standard was originally developed to support manufacture. It was intended to help with the conversion of design output into physical products. It soon became clear that it was also necessary to consider product life-cycle planning. This necessity led to the inclusion of eco-design, disassembly and EoL considerations.


BS 8887 is a highly authoritative source of information that supports the emerging industrial trend towards sustainable production. More EoL processing and product life-cycle planning standards and additional specific standards, directly applicable to various industries and product groups, will expand the series.


and health and safety given in the body of the standard. It is for the designer and/or relevant design collaborators to decide on the relative priority to be given to issues once they have been considered.”


The standard is not a prescriptive set of requirements against which a product can be certified as compliant, but highlights the design and planning issues that must be addressed to support sustainability. A firm manufacturing disability aids commented: “As much as possible is recycled. The number of parts that can’t be reused is kept as small as possible for disposal. Much of this is based around the fact that it costs money to


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dispose of electronic products. It makes sense to reduce the cost of disposal.”


The BS 8887-1 ‘Best Practice Sequence of Events’ features several differences from the model shown in figure 3, but most notably now contains ‘life-cycle considerations, including end-of-life processing’ and ‘design for assembly and disassembly’. This requirement for design for disassembly was sometimes unintentionally achieved through design for assembly: “In terms of companies applying it, I think many of them are doing it as part of the design process they go through, sometimes without recognising it, because they are designing for assembly. Obviously, the links between that and disassembly and remanufacture are strong.”


However, there are differences between design for assembly and design for disassembly. Just because something is designed to be simple to put together, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can come apart easily. One company working with lasers had designed their product for assembly, but had definitely not designed it for disassembly. They did not want their product to be reverse-engineered and taken apart for security reasons. Their solution was to encase the technology in resin.


It is widely recognised that it is in the early stages of product development where sustainability can be most effectively addressed. Under BS 8887-1, a ‘MADE team’ is required for the development of the design brief. Collaboration between representatives of the various disciplines is not uncommon in commercial design. Early stage inclusion of people with expertise in product ‘take-back facilitation’ and ‘environment’ within the MADE team, should greatly improve the EoL value of the product being planned.


Around 70-80% of a product’s features, manufacturing methods and costs are determined during the early stages of the design process8


. There was unanimous


agreement among those interviewed that the beginning of the design process is the optimal time to apply life-cycle planning. One technical product developer commented: “In reviewing the standard, I have been through each of the sections to tie it in with what we do and, if necessary, I have changed what we do to help fall in line with that, as long as it doesn’t contradict anything that we are already trying to do


for other standards. The interesting thing for us is the EoL information because of the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive. In trying to comply with that... it’s good to have it at the front end as well.”


Not all of the Standard’s users were motivated by its sustainable design content. In an interview with a construction firm specialising in building support systems, it transpired that BS 8887-1 was part of a batch of standards bought to assist with product optimisation for manufacture. Financial considerations still dominate decision-making during the design process: “The goal is to value analyse each item beginning with those with the highest volume of sales and ask ‘can we reduce the cost?’ or with the larger products ‘can we improve the efficiency and reduce the cost?’ If the weight of a casting can be reduced by 10%, the cost will be reduced by almost 10%.”


Standards are written by consensus; they could be regarded as statements of basic requirements to be exceeded: “The standard can be part of the process, but 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


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