Sustainable design in the electronics industry

Awareness of “sustainability” has mushroomed in recent years, due to anxieties over energy security and global warming. One significant driver of our energy appetite is the rapid growth of the electronics industry — worldwide energy demand for household electronics is projected to triple over the next 20 years. [ 1] This explosive growth also places pressure on the availability of natural resources for manufacturing, because the electronics industry has a significant environmental footprint. For example, it has been estimated that production of a 2-gram 32MB memory chip can require as much as 1,200 grams of fossil fuels, 72 grams of chemicals, and 32,000 grams of water. [ 2].

Moreover, electronic products tend to become obsolete rapidly, and recycling efforts have struggled to keep pace with the mounting flow of electronic waste. This has led to regulatory initiatives such as the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which requires each nation to set collection, recycling and recovery targets for electronic products, including televisions, computers, and cellular phones, and imposes the responsibility for take-back and disposal of the equipment on the original manufacturers.

Continued economic growth, especially in developing nations, will require global collaboration and clever innovation to achieve sustainability. That is why most leading electronics manufacturers have adopted a business practice called Design for Environment (DFE), which assures that new products are developed with a full understanding of their environmental impacts. DFE involves the sys¬tematic consideration of design performance with respect to environmental, health, safety, and sustainability objectives over the full product and process life cycle. [3 ]

No product can be called “sustainable” without reference to the broader system in which it is manufactured and used. Enterprises depend on natural resources for materials, energy, and ecosystem services — such as fresh water — and they also deposit wastes into the environment. The challenge of DFE is to consider the entire system and determine how the needs and expectations of customers and other stakeholders can be met in the most resource efficient, effective, and environmentally benign manner.

Life Cycle Thinking

Underlying the practice of DFE is the fundamental principle of life cycle thinking. This simply means that during product and process design companies need to think beyond the cost, technology and functional performance of the design and consider the broader consequences at each stage of the product life cycle. The following five stages are consistent with logistics models broadly used in the supply chain management community [4 ].

• Source: acquire the raw materials, components, energy and services required to manufacture the product
• Make: manufacture and/or assemble the product, inspect, package, and stockpile or prepare the product for delivery
• Deliver: transport the product via distribution channels to warehouses, wholesalers, and/or retail customers
• Support: provide services to customers or users of the product, including supplies, repair, replacement, maintenance, or upgrading
• Recycle: recover used, obsolete, or defective products and extract residual value through re-use, refurbishment, or recycling.

In each of these stages, there may be positive or negative consequences in terms of financial performance, human health and safety, and environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity and natural resource depletion. Rather than merely considering how the product is handled and used, designers must consider the entire value-added chain — the “upstream” processes involved in producing the components, raw materials and energy to fabricate the product, as well as the “downstream” processes involved in its distribution, use and disposal. They must also consider how byproducts or releases from these processes may affect humans or the environment.

To understand the environmental consequences, it is helpful for designers to develop a life cycle resource flow diagram, as illustrated in Figure 1. Raw materials and energy are consumed by value-adding processes that create electronic products, and then value is extracted when these products are utilized by consumers. There are several points along the life cycle where waste and emissions are generated, representing opportunities for recovery and “revalorization” of discarded materials.

Design teams can use “life cycle assessment” techniques to help quantify the costs and benefits of alternative design concepts. [5] In addition, companies should consider not only potential impacts on the success of their business, but also the broader economic, environmental, and social consequences (e.g., health and safety) for affected stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, contractors, and local communities. Examples of potential life cycle considerations are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Potential life cycle consequences of product or process design decisions

Design for Environment in Practice

Early adopters of DFE, such as Intel, HP, and Xerox, have enhanced their competitiveness by introducing environmentally responsible products that provide exceptional customer value. But DFE cannot be practiced casually. Companies need to build upon their past experiences and develop a portfolio of design strategies that can be communicated through systematic training. This will encourage a repeatable and consistent innovation process rather than anecdotal successes based on individual ingenuity. The following summarizes four major categories of DFE guidelines, based on worldwide best practices compiled over a decade. [3]

Design for Dematerialization: Minimize material throughput as well as the associated energy and resource consumption at every stage of the life cycle. This can be achieved through a variety of techniques such as energy efficiency, product life extension, source reduction, process simplification, remanufacturing, use of recycled inputs, or substitution of services for products. Dematerialization represents the best opportunity for decoupling economic growth from resource consumption.

For example, in 2008, in response to a challenge from Wal-Mart to reduce packaging, HP introduced the Pavilion dv6929 notebook PC in a recycled laptop bag with 97 percent less packaging than typical laptops. The carrying bag contains no foam, only some plastic bags for consumers to dispose of. The bag itself, save for the buckle, strap and zipper, is made out of 100 percent recycled fabric. HP is able to fit three bags in a box for shipping the product to stores, thus reducing energy use and costs related to logistics.

In addition to reduced power consumption in consumer products, the industry is reducing data center energy use through “virtualization” and other technologies. For example, Microsoft has adopted a commoditized manufacturing approach to make data centers modular, scalable, efficient and as low-cost as possible. Its latest generation design has a Power Usage Effectiveness — the fraction of energy actually used for computing — of 1.12, among the lowest yet achieved. Microsoft is also working toward a chiller-free design, in hopes of eliminating water use.

Design for Detoxification: Minimize the potential for adverse human or ecological effects at every stage of the life cycle. This can be achieved through replacement of toxic or hazardous materials with benign ones, introduction of cleaner technologies that reduce harmful wastes and emissions, including greenhouse gases, or waste modification using chemical, energetic or biological treatment. Note that, while detoxification can reduce environmental impacts, it may not substantially reduce resource consumption.

For example, brominated flame retardants in plastic materials have been eliminated from many electronic products due to evidence of potential chronic toxicity. The electronics industry has developed a Joint Industry Guide (JIG) for Material Composition Declaration of Electronic Products, along with an online registry where suppliers can provide their declarations. This initiative helps to assure that parts suppliers are not using certain restricted materials, including asbestos, heavy metals, ozone depleting compounds, and many other specific chemicals.

Design for Revalorization: Recover residual value from materials and resources that have already been utilized in the economy, thus reducing the need for extraction of virgin resources. This can be achieved by finding secondary uses for discarded products, refurbishing or remanufacturing products and components at the end of their useful life, facilitating disassembly and material separation for durable products, and finding economical ways to recycle and reuse waste streams. Revalorization goes hand in glove with dematerialization, since repeatedly cycling resources within the economy reduces the need to extract them from the environment.

For example, before sustainability became fashionable, Xerox pioneered the practice of converting end-of-life electronic equipment into new products and parts. Xerox began a systematic “asset recovery” program in 1991, and by 2008 remanufacturing and recycling had given new life to more than 2.8 million copiers, printers and multifunction systems, while diverting nearly two billion pounds of potential waste from landfills — 111 million pounds in 2006 alone. Moreover, the program has saved more than $2 billion over that period. To accomplish this, Xerox developed a comprehensive process for taking back end-of-life products, including design methods for ease of disassembly and recovery as well as systematic processes for remanufacture, parts reuse and recycling.

Design for Capital Protection and Renewal: Assure the availability and integrity of the three types of productive capital that are essential for prosperity:

• Human capital includes the health, safety, and well being of employees, customers, and other stakeholders.
• Natural capital includes the natural resources and ecosystem services that support the value chain.
• Economic capital includes enterprise assets such as facilities, equipment, and intellectual property.
• Renewal of capital may include attracting new talent, revitalizing ecosystems, and building new factories.

For example, Intel Corporation has invested in conservation of water at its semiconductor fabrication plants, some of which are located in water-stressed areas such as Arizona and Israel. At Intel’s Chandler, Arizona facility, treated process water is sent to an off-site municipal treatment plant, brought up to drinking water standards, and re-injected into the underground aquifer at a rate of about 1.5 million gallons per day.

Measuring Success

Performance measurement is a key element of new product development, because it assures that the product will meet a variety of customer requirements as well as corporate priorities and regulatory constraints. The choice of DFE indicators is important because it determines (a) what types of signals are sent to engineering and manufacturing staff, and (b) how company performance is communicated to outside audiences.

A variety of environmental performance measures are used in the electronics industry. Examples include:

• Toxic use (e.g., total kg of solvents purchased per unit of production)
• Resource utilization (e.g., total energy consumed during the product life cycle)
• Atmospheric emissions (e.g., greenhouse gases released per unit of production)
• Waste minimization (e.g., percent of product materials recovered at end-of-life)

A more progressive approach to performance measurement is the concept of eco-efficiency, first introduced by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. In a nutshell, eco-efficiency means generating more value with less adverse ecological impacts, thus combining economic success with environmental resource protection. A common approach toward measuring eco-efficiency is to take the ratio of value produced, including products and byproducts, to resources consumed; for example, sales per BTU of energy. Through eliminating waste and using resources more wisely, eco-efficient companies are able to reduce costs and become more competitive.

Collaborating for Sustainability

By now, most electronics companies have taken steps to embed DFE practices into their new product development processes. Their next step has typically been to shift attention to the practices of their suppliers. In 2006, a global coalition of electronic industry companies entered into an unprecedented international collaboration to develop a set of supplier expectations, known as the Electronic Industry Citizenship Code. The code provides comprehensive principles for management of environmental releases, workplace health and safety, labor practices, and business ethics, and is supported by standardized supplier assessment and auditing procedures.

Another example of industry collaboration is the multi-stakeholder process that developed the environmental performance standard IEEE 1680, published in 2006. This standard integrates a wide variety of existing regulations and standards, including U.S. Energy Star, the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), and the WEEE Directive mentioned above. It specifies environmental impact criteria across all product life cycle stages, providing a basis for buyers to assess the environmental performance of desktop and notebook computers and displays.

As global collaboration around sustainability continues to evolve, the electronics industry may have an even more important role to play, beyond the environmental footprint of its products. Electronic communication and information technology is gradually displacing the need for resource-intensive physical products and processes. This may be the ultimate direction of dematerialization, providing a low-carbon path to global economic prosperity.

Acknowledgement
Portions of this article are based on the book by Joseph Fiksel, Design for Environment: A Guide to Sustainable Product Development, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009.

References
1. International Energy Agency
2. E.D. Williams, R.U. Ayres, and M. Heller, “The 1.7 Kilogram Microchip: Energy and Material Use in the Production of Semiconductor Devices,” Envir. Science & Technology, 36, 5504, 2002.
3. J. Fiksel, Design for Environment: A Guide to Sustainable Product Development, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009.
4. See the supply chain operations reference model (SCOR) developed by the Supply Chain Council, www.supply-chain.org.
5. An introduction to LCA techniques is available at http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/lcaccess/

Tags: Design for Dematerialization, Design for Detoxification, Design for Environment, Design for Revalorization, DfE, Electronics Industry, Electronics Products, Energy Star, Global Warming, HP, Intel, Life Cycle, Life-Cycle Assessment, Microsoft, New Product Development, Recovery, Recycling, RoHS, Sustainability, Sustainable Design, Value-Added Chain, Virtualization, WEEE, Xerox

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