Video reflection

Greenfly

Greenfly is a nice web tool for lifecycle analysis. It takes consideration to manufacture, materials, transport, use and end of life aspects of your product. It splits the impacts areas into water use, solid waste, energy use and global warming. It also takes into account the lifetime and if your product is recyclable. The website also offer design strategies to help you in the process of making your product greener and communicating the sustainable aspects.

This tool simplifies the process of measuring and making your product greener. It is a nice measuring tool for sustainability, but however it is simplified. It takes into account a lot of the measurable sustainability problems, but from the video it doesn’t seem to take into account social and ethical problems related to different manufacturers. So this tool alone is not a guarantee that your design is becoming more sustainable, but it is good help in the right direction.

Source: http://www.greenflyonline.org/video.php

Whole Systems and Lifecycle Thinking

In whole systems and lifecycle thinking you focus on more than how to improve the measureable aspects of your current products lifecycle, like how you can improve the system it is a part of. It is a more open approach to the sustainability problems and it tries to use the benefits of the different sustainability strategies.

Source: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/whole-systems-and-lifecycle-thinking

Improving product lifetime

Product lifetime strategies involve making the product, components and materials last longer. You could for instance do this by making the product more durable, easy to disassemble, upgrade, repair and recycle. By increasing the products, components or materials lifetime you will produce less products and materials and therefore often make less emissions. However you also need to take into account that not all products will make us benefit environmentally with a longer life. A good example of this is old cars that use more petrol than new ones.

Source: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/improving-product-lifetime

Lightweighting

By making the products lighter, you save material and transport costs and increase the sustainability of your product. Optimising geometry by using thinner wall thickness, reinforcements, hollowing parts, trusses etc. can do this. Different design programs or new manufacturing methods can help you to do this. Lightweighting isn’t always the right design strategy for sustainability; you can use whole systems thinking to look at when it is smart to use this strategy. For example it could be better to improve the products lifetime by increasing the wall thickness, than it would be to make the wall thickness thinner.

Source: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/lightweighting

Green materials selection

Green materials selection focuses on the use of materials that are abundant, non-toxic, requires minimal resources, has good physical properties for its function, meets regulations, has good end of life options and is affordable. If you combine this with looking at the lifecycle and the different alternatives and how they affect the lifecycle you can make your product “greener”.

Source: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/green-materials-selection

Energy efficient design

This strategy focuses on making your product more energy effective. You can do this by decreasing your energy loss or focus on making the energy source more sustainable.

Source: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/energy-efficient-design