Sustainable Product Strategies EXP-0020-F Syllabus Tuesday 6:30 PM 9:00 PM Fall 2010

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1 Sustainable Product Strategies EXP-0020-F Syllabus Tuesday 6:30 PM 9:00 PM Fall 2010 Instructor: Gregory Morose Course Description: The world economy annually produces more than $60 trillion of products and services including automobiles, water bottles, computers, Ipods, shoes, and many other products. These products generate a tremendous global burden including depletion of natural resources, pollution, climate change, ozone depletion, and adverse impacts on human and environmental health. Did you know that 70% of the environmental impact of a product is determined during the product design stage? This course is intended for undergraduate students that have an interest in understanding the environmental impacts of products, as well as the strategies necessary to mitigate these impacts. This course will provide an introduction to designing more sustainable products which includes concepts such as product lifecycle thinking, cradle to cradle, eco-design, material selection, product safety, recycling, reuse, green chemistry, biomimicry, detoxification, and design for the environment. Statement of Course Goals: Sustainable products are designed to conserve materials and energy, eliminate toxic substances, and reduce the generation of wastes and emissions throughout the entire product life cycle. This course introduces students to the sustainability aspects of products used in today s economy. The entire product life cycle will be considered during this course including material extraction (i.e. mining), material processing, manufacturing, transportation, product use, and disposal. The students will learn strategies to identify the health and environmental impacts during the product life cycle, as well as how to apply sustainable product strategies to address these impacts. The students will learn how to use and apply a life cycle assessment software tool to assist with quantifying environmental and human health impacts of products. The students will select a product that will be used for three of the four take home exercises. This will include an analysis of the product s functionality, an evaluation of the environmental impacts of the product across all life cycle stages, and the application of sustainable strategies to reduce the environmental impact of the product. Ultimately, the students will understand the importance that product design decisions have on the overall environmental burden of products. This knowledge will be essential for engineering majors, business majors, and others that will one day have a direct or indirect impact on product development decisions. Their ability to make better and more informed decisions will ultimately help make the world more sustainable.

2 Course Outline: Class Subject Readings Assigned Class 1: Sept 7 Class Introduction, Sustainability, Sustainable Product Framework Ecology of Commerce: Chapter 2 What are the requirements of this course? What is sustainable development? What are the requirements of a sustainable product? Story of Stuff: Chapter 2 Production Nature article: Value of Ecosystem Services Class 2: Sept 14 Product Life Cycle and Impacts What are the key environmental, health, and safety impacts of products? How do products contribute to environmental issues such as climate change, eutrophication, acid rain, and ozone depletion? How do toxic chemicals in products affect human and ecological health? Green Marketing: Chapter 3 Why Conventional Marketing Won t Work Green Washing: Do you know what you are buying? article Class 3: Sept 21 Story of Stuff Video Exercise One Assigned: Green Marketing Impacts Continued, Sustainability Declarations and Green Marketing What are the key elements of a sustainable product? How is sustainability measured? What are eco-labels and how are they used? What are the seven sins of green-washing that are sometimes used to advertise products that are claimed to be environmentally friendly? How can we more effectively analyze the merits of green advertisements? Sustainable Solutions: Developing Products and Services for the Future, Chapter 6 The Lowell Center Framework for Sustainable Products

3 Class Subject Readings Assigned Class 4: Sept 28 Product Design Basics What are the fundamental product design concepts? Sustainable Minds LCA, Learning Center Who is involved in product design? What is a product life cycle? Why is 70% of a product s environmental impact determined during the design stage? Design is the Problem, LCA Chapter Class 5: Oct 5 Class 6: Oct 12 Class 7: Oct 19 Exercise One Due: Green Marketing Exercise Two Assigned: Product Analysis Life Cycle Assessment What is life cycle assessment? How is it used to evaluate and compare the environmental impact of different products? How does the environmental impact of a Prius compare to a Hummer? How does the environmental impact of a paper bag compare to a plastic bag? How can the Sustainable Minds software be used to conduct Life Cycle Assessments? Product Selection Required for Exercise Two Life Cycle Assessment The students will conduct a class exercise to use the Sustainable Minds software to evaluate the environmental impacts of a sample product: a ski tuner. The students will then brainstorm potential design changes to reduce the environmental impact of the product. The results of these design changes will then be evaluated using the Sustainable Minds software. Exercise Two Due: Product Analysis Exercise Three Assigned: Life Cycle Evaluation Material Selection and Sustainable Minds Data Strategies will be discussed to help students understand how to select materials for products that have less environmental impact. Class time will be provided to students to enter data into Sustainable Minds software for the product they have chosen for Exercise 3. Sustainable Minds Quick Start Guide Design + Environment: Section 4.1: Select Low Impact Materials Materials Matter, Chapter 13: Dematerialization Sustainability through Servicizing

4 Class Subject Readings Assigned Class 8: Oct 26 Dematerialization What are the best methods for designing products with high durability and long life? How can physical products be transformed to services? How can physical products be replaced with information, digital data, recipes, or instructions? How can we design products to facilitate disassembly for inspection, repair, and upgrading? How can we better design products to facilitate recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse? How can we increase the intensity of material usage for a product? What are some strategies to evaluate and select low impact materials? N/A Class 9: Nov 2 Class 10: Nov 16 How can we use less material and energy for the manufacturing and use of products? Life Cycle Evaluation: Presentation and Review Students present the results of the life cycle evaluation for their products. Discussion and feedback period after each student presentation. After all student presentations are complete, the instructor will facilitate a class discussion to compare and contrast the various student presentations. Exercise Three Due: Life Cycle Evaluation Exercise Four Assigned: Sustainable Product Design Closing the Loop How can we transform from a cradle to grave economy to a cradle to cradle system? What is industrial ecology? How can industrial ecology strategies reduce the overall impact of products? Waste = Food Video Cradle to Cradle Chapter 4 Industrial Ecology in Practice article Clean Production Action: Green Screen White Paper

5 Class Subject Readings Assigned Class Detoxification Green Chemistry article 11: Nov 23 What is a toxic substance? Designboom: Biomimicry How do toxic substances affect human and environmental health? Why are toxic substances used in products? What are the key strategies to eliminate or reduce the use of toxic substances in products? What tools are available to eliminate or reduce the use of toxic substances in products? How are these tools used? Class 12: Nov 30 Blue Vinyl Video Green Chemistry, Biomimicry, and Summary of Clean Product Design Strategies N/A Class 13: Dec 7 What are the fundamental principles of Green Chemistry? How can Green Chemistry be used during the design process to make products more sustainable? What are some examples of Green Chemistry applications that have helped to make products more sustainable? What is biomimicry? What are some examples of biomimicry that have helped reduce the impact of products? Janine Benyus Video Sustainable Product Design: Presentation and Review Students present the results of the sustainable design solutions for their products. Discussion and feedback period after each student presentation. After all student presentations are complete, the instructor will facilitate a class discussion to compare and contrast the various student presentations. N/A Exercise Four Due: Sustainable Product Design

6 Course Materials: The students will have reading assignments from many diverse sources provided by the instructor. There is no requirement to buy any books for this course. Students will need to purchase a one semester subscription (or several monthly subscriptions) for the Sustainable Minds Life Cycle Assessment software for approximately $40. This software is available at and a free 30 day trial subscription is available before you purchase a subscription. The software subscription also provides on-line access to several important sources of information such as life cycle assessment methods and product life cycle impacts. The instructor already has an existing educator license for this software. The software will be used to generate quantitative data about the environmental impacts of products. All reading assignments will be provided by the instructor including: Martin Charter and Ursula Tischner, Sustainable Solutions: Developing Products and Services for the Future, Chapter 6: Sustainable Product Design, Clean Production Action, The Green Screen for Safer Chemicals, January Robert Costanza et. al., The Value of the World s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital, Nature, Vol.. 387, May 15, Richard Dahl, Green Washing: Do you know what you are buying?, Environmental Health Perspectives, June DesignBoom, Biomimicry, John Ehrenfeld and Nicholas Gertler, Industrial Ecology in Practice, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ken Geiser, Materials Matter: Toward a Sustainable Materials Policy, Chapter 13: Dematerialization, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, Chapter 2: The Death of Birth, Harper Business, Helen Lewis and John Gertsakis, Design + Environment, Green Leaf Publishing, 2001 Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff, Free Press, Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP), The Lowell Center Framework for Sustainable Products, November William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, Chapter 4: Waste Equals Food, North Point Press, 2002.

7 Jacquie Ottman, Green Marketing: Chapter 3 Why Conventional Marketing Won t Work, NTC Business Books, Chicago IL, Sandra Rothberg, MIT Sloan Management Review, Sustainability through Servicizing, Vol. 48, No. 2, Winter Nathan Shedroff, Design is the Problem, Rosenfeld Media, John Warner, Amy Cannon, and Kevin Dye, Green Chemistry, Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Student Evaluation: The following is an overview of the four exercises to be assigned for this course. Exercise One: GREEN MARKETING The students will be expected to understand the many sustainable design concepts presented in the class, and then apply them to real world products. For this exercise, the students will be required to identify and analyze several advertisements that can be found in magazines, newspapers, television, retail shelves, or on the web that promote products for environmental values. The students will prepare a short report that assesses these advertisements against what they perceive to be the true environmental impacts of the product. They will need to critically assess how the advertisement tries to promote the image of environmentally friendliness, evaluate the accuracy of the advertising claim, and develop criticisms of the advertisement. Exercise Two: PRODUCT ANALYSIS The students will select a simple product (flashlight, bicycle pump, etc.) to conduct a product analysis. The analysis will include a critical evaluation of the product in the following areas: Product appeal: Why does the product appeal to consumers? Product functionality: What needs does this product meet? What are the requirements and functionality of the product and the major components? Product differentiation: How does this product differ from competitor products? Cost effectiveness: How appropriate is the value of this product? (the relationship between to product cost to you and the product value to you)

8 Exercise Three: LIFE CYCLE EVALUATION The students will select a product and de-construct it into its component pieces, analyze each piece, and identify many of the life-cycle environmental, health and safety aspects of the product. The students will identify all of the unique materials and postulate all of the process steps that produce the product from extraction or synthesis of raw materials to end-of-life treatment and disposal. The students will identify the major environmental or public health impacts that are associated with each phase of the life cycle. Life cycle assessment software will be used to generate a quantitative life cycle assessment score. Students will also identify qualitative life cycle issues that are not covered by the software tool. Exercise Four: SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN This exercise is a continuation of the product information gathered during Exercise 3. The students will identify as many as possible clean product design solutions to address the identified environmental, health, and safety impacts of each step of the life cycle for the product evaluated in Exercise 3. The strategies should include the use of low impact materials, greener manufacturing methods, efficient packaging and distribution, low-impact use, optimized product lifetime, hazardous material reduction, and product end-of-life strategies. The students will enter the new design solutions into the life cycle assessment software to compare the net environmental impact with the initial product evaluated in Exercise 3. Exercise 1 4 Requirements: The results of each exercise will be submitted in a written report. The reports will be graded based upon the students understanding of the concepts presented in class, as well as the creativity in applying sustainable design strategies to their product. In addition, the results of the third and fourth exercises will be presented by students to the class using a powerpoint presentation format. The course grade will be determined by the quality of work displayed in student written reports for each of the four assigned exercises, the student presentations for Exercises #3, and #4, and student participation during class. Grading: Exercise #1 Report: 15% Exercise #2 Report: 15% Exercise #3 Report & Presentation: 30% Exercise #4 Report & Presentation: 40% Total : 100% Attendance and class participation will count in formulating the final grade.

9 Office Hours: Upon student request to meet, the instructor will be available before or after class to meet with students at the Tower Café in Tisch Library.

Life cycle Assessment

Life cycle Assessment Life Cycle Assessment LCA is a 'cradle to grave' method of assessing environmental impact. It is an analysis which covers the entire life cycle of a product or function, from the