Chapter 1: Level Setting Product Sustainability

---

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

---

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.

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."