Chapter 1: Level Setting Product Sustainability

[Jaime_Lee]

Please copy the question below that most resonates with you with your answer in your reply. (It counts towards your Sustainability Badge!)

-How does the book define sustainability in the context of product life cycles?

-How do compliance and profitability drive sustainability efforts?

Personal Impact: How has your understanding of sustainability evolved over time, and what specific experiences have influenced your perspective?

Register for Sustainability Chat with PTC VP Dave Duncan July 10!

[kdirth]

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How does the book define sustainability in the context of product life cycles?

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Sustainability is much more than what is done within the walls of a manufacturer.  You must consider everything from the source of the raw materials to what happens to the product after its useful life is done.

Personally, I have at times, paid attention to what happens to something that is no longer useful, and I need to dispose of it.  Many things are full of reusable materials but are very difficult to separate into separate parts that can be recycled.  Some things can be separated, with some effort, but can the resulting small pieces get recycled?  Small items on the recycling belt often fall though or are not picked out for recycling.  Also, many materials are recyclable but there is not enough of a market to make it valuable enough to deal with.  That which does not get recycled ends up buried in the landfill.  And there are many things that just cannot be recycled or separated.

I have deconstructed many toys, machines, pieces of furniture, etc. (with help from the children) to recycle as much as possible.  How much actually made it into the raw material stream is anyone's guess.

[dduncan]

I agree with your observations about the frustrations of recycling.  Disassembly is difficult when it's not premeditated in design.  Pieces can be small, and it's destination varies based on collection location.  To drive circularity, designers, manufactures, and service teams need to aspire to higher "Re-X" levels than recycling - reduce, repair, refurbish, and remanufacture.  These levels can have more reliable follow through and higher value.  But recycling remains an important #5 where obsolescence products and consumables are needed - much to figure out there.

[kdirth]

Another area that many times falls short is quality/durability.  Many products are built with cost being the priority leading to short life spans.  I try to buy better quality products but many times a quality version is either hard to find, hard to determine before buying, or nonexistent.

[dduncan]

Yes, durability/circularity should be more transparent for buyers and differentiating for the selling manufacturers.  Digital Product Passports hold a lot of promise for this.  These passports are more mass-market readable than their predecessors like Environmental Product Declarations.  Check out the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) work on the passport topic and the adoption its building for its underlying Asset Administration Shell (AAS) data exchange standard.  Passports will be a strong business driver towards better footprints, including durability - B2C approaches can include QR codes on products to help with consumer choices.  B2B can have more.

[Dale_Rosema]

Our refrigerator in the office needed a $5 (I was going to say one dollar) dip switch replaced that failed. The problem was that the part was heat staked to a $250 module that had to be replaced. Less bolts and screws makes quicker production times, but is lousy for repair options. Throw out the whole old module. (After I looked at it and how it was designed.)

[dduncan]

Sounds like poor "design for disassembly" on an expensive an oversized field replaceable unit.  If the $250 unit was returnable with reimbursement and then remanufactured, that's slightly better.  But it seems the dip switch should have been ID'ed earlier in design as a likely fail part and either be its own FRU or at least within one smaller than the $250 unit.  A commercial incentive could be mixed up here too - if the dip switch rarely fails within the warranty period.  As appliances gain longer service contracts or even leasing, the design incentives should improve.  Right to Repair and Extended Producer Responsibility regional rules will help the design incentive too.

[TEChi]

This case raises more questions and illuminates more systemic problems. Assuming that you really need a refrigerator in the office, did the buyer of that refrigerator choose a brand among the highest reliability ratings? Did the buyer choose a model with the highest efficiency rating? Does your company have a policy that requires its buyer to choose the lowest cost option? If so, does that include the cost of replacement and projected life, and the cost of operation? Checking these boxes would definitely send the message to the company that made your refrigerator to spend more on quality. Is the failure of the present refrigerator an opportunity to replace it with one that checks both of these boxes? Refrigerators are on continuously for years, so this could be more important to sustainability than DfD. I didn't know refrigerators have dip switches. That doesn't sound like it's user-serviceable. If end-users are supposed to use them, then a more durable type of switch should probably have been chosen, and placed in a more accessible location. Or was this a case of an untrained installer (you?)? I can imagine a dip-switch that snaps in to its PCB initially, but that, or screws to hold it in place wouldn't help the electrical connections, which are typically soldered. And adding a socket to the PCB to receive the dip switch adds more opportunities for failure. So choosing a high-reliability refrigerator might have been the best way to avoid a cheap dip-switch. 

[Dale_Rosema]

The dip switch was on the module that controlled the water/ice dispenser. I don't remember exactly what, but it may have been for the flipper door that opens and closes with each ice dispensing. A technician was called in to diagnose and on a return trip replace the module. As an engineer, I was just curious as to how the module worked and what caused the failure.  

[JH_10417155]

Interesting situation I have encountered BOTH Ways on many designs. Heat staking is more manufacturable, cheaper and requires less tools than a removable fastener, but if the product is intended to be disassembled they are a must! Screws are one of the only fasteners that is ONLY uniquely valuable in its removal! so if it is intended to be permanent, adhesive, heat stake or any number of other processes are correct. Fact is that if it was designed well, the switch life expectancy is similar to the module... It is nicer that it gets replaced at the same time, like a headlight! Saves a technician replacing two things.

[dduncan]

I love the fridge discussion - I'm meeting with the Sustainability VP of a home appliance manufacturer next month.  This is good context for FMEA/modularity-FRU/Re-X approaches.  I'll report back what I can with his permission.

[kdirth]

I am a DIYer when it comes to repairing stuff at home.  I get annoyed at the things that are not made to repair easily.  The last annoying repair was a dishwasher where I needed to remove a hose, and the connection was made with a permanent crimp.  I had to cut it off and procure a new hose clamp to reinstall it. 😬

[TEChi]

I'll start by following the instructions, "Please copy the question below that most resonates with you with your answer in your reply."

-How does the book define sustainability in the context of product life cycles?

I started reading the book, and before I even got to the first chapter, the introduction made this questionable assertion:

"You don't need to overhaul how you work today."

I have been working on a sustainable product design team for the past couple of years, and the first thing that we noticed was that we didn't even have a way to measure the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) of a new design concept. As we set out to fix that, we realized that the problem was much worse. The available published EFs are spotty and primitive. Our procurement people were only starting to gather CO2 Emissions Factors for our raw materials, and many of our suppliers didn't have a clue. In short, our entire new product design infrastructure, in pursuit of profit, had evolved to systematically ignore externalities, including PCF. To evaluate new concept PCFs we had to collect massive amounts of proprietary material data and make it easily available to score new product concepts. PTC is finally catching up with this by linking part volume with material identification that includes EFs, but it still ignores scrap, which can more than double a PCF, and other inputs that I can't even talk about here. It's still a struggle to encompass an entire product with a LifeCycle Analysis (LCA) even at the production stage. While a team approach throughout the product lifecycle has always been essential to profitability, the need to find and choose more sustainable materials and methods continues to ripple through the entire organization, and up our supply chains. Even today, EFs are treated more like a cost, subject to change, than as a property, intrinsic to each material. How do we even specify a material for a part based on it?

Sustainability has become an essential requirement for profitability. So, while I agree that we do have to keep on using the tools that we have to make good products, the new tools that we are adopting are necessarily overhauling the way we work. I like to say, "If we always do what we always did, we'll always get what we always got." 

[dduncan]

TEChi, thank you for the comments - your details on the new work you're doing with sustainable design are helpful.

Regarding the book's statement:  "You don't need to overhaul how you work today."   The intent here was to note that existing integrated model-based and BOM-based approaches can effectively incorporate sustainability with attributes as material/part/manufacturing_process/configuration levels.  Likewise, requirements tracing can drive footprint reductions and simulation process can incorporate LCA's early and often as "environmental simulations".

And I agree with material management - at last, it's here!  So much footprint is in materials - it needs to be a first-class life cycle managed concept in PLM.

Also agree that upstream supplier data is tough to get today, and it's frustrating since that's where most of the footprint lies.  It'll improve over time with groups like the IDTA and their Asset Administration Shell standard.  In the meantime, innovative LCA providers like Makersite can receive BOM's with varying supplier data precisions and reasonably estimate the remaining gaps based on graphs of known and estimated supply chains.  Supplier data will be a jungle for a while - hopefully less so within 5 years.

Thanks again,

Dave

[mhinderer]

Hi,

Die Möglichkeit ins Deutsche zu übersetzen wäre gut, Mail und Webside.

Gruß Mario

[dduncan]

Hallo Mario, wir haben Deutsche ubersetzungsoption, angeboten, aber unsere deutchen Kollegen meinten, English sei ok.

Vielen Dank für das Feedback – eine deutsche Übersetzung ist mit unserer nächsten Buch-Iteration noch möglich

[mhinderer]

Diese Kollegen mögen gut englisch sprechen können.

Wenn Englisch i.O. sein soll wozu Koreanische und chinesische Übersetzung??

Ich zum Beispiel spreche gerade so englisch. Alltägliches Englisch geht, fachspezifischeres nicht!

Große Textmengen wie bei Euch auf der Webseite oder in den Kommentaren schrecken mich ab,

und ich schließe ohne den Versuch zu machen die Seite so gut wie sofort. Ich bin damit überfordert und habe ein großes Aber dagegen.

Es ist Egoistisch in meinen Augen zu Sagen ich kann das lesen also müssen das alle anderen auch können.

[dduncan]

Ihr Englisch ist sicherlich besser als mein Deutsch (ich war in den 1990er Jahren einige Jahre in Deutschland stationiert), daher freue ich mich über Ihre Kommentare. Mit einem deutschen Buch wäre ich in einer ähnlichen Situation.

Wir haben unsere Ländervertreter gefragt, in welche Sprachen das Buch übersetzt werden soll. Ich werde Ihr Feedback an unsere mitteleuropäischen Kollegen weitergeben, wenn wir mit unserem Verlag über die Übersetzung der nächsten Buchversion beraten.

[TEChi]

I note that there is the option to translate German to English, so the opposite seems reasonable.