In the beginning there was design

The importance of design reaches biblical proportions when you consider 70-80 per cent of environmental impacts are locked in at design stage. Richard Collins reports.

Wine connoisseurs who turned their noses up at screwtop caps replacing corks now have a new innovation to sniff at – plastic wine bottles from Wolf Blass designed to resemble glass but with a 29 per cent smaller carbon footprint.

Colgate-Palmolive’s new 2X Ultra line of concentrated laundry detergents are packed in boxes or bottles that are half the weight or volume of their conventional cousins. Across the country, the company says this means some 30 million fewer kilograms or litres of detergent consumed annually for the same number of washes.

In Europe, the home of design for the environment, several washing machine companies have rolled out technology where they can upgrade the software in their machines down the phone line. The operating parameters can be remotely updated if, for example, new detergents require less water. It designs continuous improvement into the product, not just the production process.

Conventional wisdom has it that 70-80 per cent of environmental impacts are locked in at the design stage. With plastics, PACIA’s Quickstart guide to design for sustainability (D4S) says: “Most plastics are technically recyclable in their pure form but their combination with other materials and their design and composition may affect recyclability. Products therefore need to be carefully designed to maximise recyclability.”

Margaret Donnan, CEO of the industry association, says product design “will increasingly become the biggest opportunity to deliver significant improvement in our response to pressing challenges like climate change and water scarcity”.

PACIA’s push down the design line is part of its Sustainability Covenant with the Victorian Government, which is also capacity building with the Australian Marketing Institute and has funded Design Victoria to the tune of $10 million to lift the profile of good design, including for the environment.
Dr Kel Dummett, Sustainability Victoria’s project manager for sustainable products & services, says outside these few initiatives design has received little attention by government, slowing uptake of the D4E philosophy among Australia’s small and medium sized manufacturing base.

“One barrier that always comes up is the lack of government leadership,” he said. “A lot of companies want to see more leadership from government in terms of policies, incentives and legislation… focusing on the front end [design].”

Lifecycle revelations
If 70-80 per cent of impacts are locked in at the design stage, then they are potentially available to be designed out; it’s just a case of what and where in the ‘product value chain’ they occur. Often that’s not in the factory.

Michelin has just released it fourth Performance and Responsibility report based on an LCA and says its Energy Saver tyre range launched in 2008 has already slashed customers’ overall fuel consumption by 66.7ML and CO2 emissions by more than 134,000 tonnes.

On the other hand, Mars Australia in February completed a nine-month project with CSIRO to develop full lifecycle analyses of four key food products and found most of the carbon and water impacts were upstream. It turned the spotlight on M&Ms’ peanuts, Dolmio spaghetti sauce, Whiskers in a can and Pedigree Meaty-Bites dry pet food.

Mars’ director of scientific affairs, Dr Roger Bektash, said the findings were a revelation.

“We for years have been priding ourselves on how efficient we are and how well we manage our sites for energy, for water, for waste. But when we look at the overall impact of carbon footprint and water impact, we found our sites were not that important in the bigger picture,” he said.

“If we are really going to make a difference in the environment longer term, for humanity and for our business survival, then we really have to look a lot more at our supply chain and start to design our products to cope with better materials.

“This has really informed us, it is a real revelation. It has gone around the Mars world, not just in Australia but globally.”

The carbon footprint work was based on a well-established PAS2050 methodology developed in the UK by the Carbon Trust, but CSIRO has gone back to first principles to look at the impact of water use, not just the quantity. It has created a region-by-region water-stress index to guide purchasing decisions.

While Dr Bektash cautions it is early days, he says over the next few years they’ll “transform these [findings] into business strategies that will deliver meaningful, tangible benefits”.

CSIRO has also developed a database that holds the detailed lifecycle findings, which Dr Bektash says include hundreds of ingredients and covers 90 per cent of raw food materials in Australia. He would not talk numbers with WME, but says CSIRO is sharing some of the information with the food industry.

Triple bottom line tools
“The low-hanging fruit are energy efficiency during the manufacture stage and the use stage of the product. Similarly, reducing water use and also reducing waste. Those are the three low hanging fruit,” said Dr Dummett.

“Some products will be more energy or water intensive in their manufacturing or their material sourcing, so it may be for some products you concentrate on the energy, as that’s the big game in town, and for others you concentrate on the water.

“The key push is to get lifecycle thinking embedded in the decision-making process of companies at the design stage.”

PACIA notes there’s a range of broad approaches, from the streamlined to the top of the line LCA, where detailed qualitative assessments of each stage of a product’s life are developed. But as Mars knows, the time and cost can be extensive.

Lifecycle mapping, on the other hand, constructs a process tree for a product that qualitatively charts all the life stages to ensure key impact areas are not overlooked.

“For example, when designing food packaging, it is important to consider how design can minimise stock damage and the associated environmental and commercial impacts,” says its guide.

A multi-criteria sustainability matrix can take this further with a mix of qualitative and quantitative information to determine key triple bottom line impacts at each stage of the lifecycle.

Last, for those wanting quantitative results but unwilling to go the whole hog, there are several streamlined tools, including PIQET for assessing packaging design and the upcoming Greenfly, an online tool developed by WSP Group that was trialled on the Sustainability Victoria site before being pulled off to finalise the business case. Unlike other streamlined LCA tools, it provides suggestions for reducing the environmental impacts of a product – and that’s the name of the game.