The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Integrating Environment and Technology: Design for Environment
Integrating Environment and Technology: Design for Environment
Pages 137-148
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From page 137... ...
Remedies were equally direct: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, Superfund, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Now, with several decades of research and experience behind us, we have begun to recognize that we are treating the symptoms, not the disease.
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From page 138... ...
Materials use in a low-design/high-material product stream tends to be relatively simple, and, in many cases, few materials are incorporated into individual items (this need not be the case, however; a snack chip bag only 0.002 inch thick consists of nine separate layers of material IOTA, 199211. Thus, recycling is fairly straightforward.
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From page 139... ...
DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENT As a practical matter, the only way the five principles enumerated above can be implemented by industry in practice, at least for high-design/low-material products and associated manufacturing processes, is by driving environmental considerations and constraints into the design process. Implementation of DFE practices is intended to accomplish this.
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From page 140... ...
Sophisticated business customers may pressure component or subassembly suppliers to reduce their use of toxic substances such as lead solders or batteries containing cadmium, or to use environmentally preferable packaging. State and national laws require recycling of batteries and elimination of heavy metals in packaging or plastics.
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From page 141... ...
Such activities include review of all internal specification documents to determine whether unnecessary environmentally harmful processes (such as cleaning with chlorinated solvents) or components (lead solder where conductive epoxy systems might
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From page 142... ...
This activity can be driven back into the design process by identifying design decisions that require environmentally harmful processing activities, and selecting alternatives. Thus, for example, use of an open relay switch on a printed wiring board requires that the board be cleaned with a chlorinated solvent, since such relays "can't swim"; that is, they cannot be exposed to water.
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From page 143... ...
An oval indicates some degree of concern: an open, or blank, oval indicates minimal concern; dots indicate some concern; diagonal lines indicate moderate concern; and solid black indicates serious concern. An important feature of this graphical approach is the ability to indicate relative degrees of uncertainty.
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From page 144... ...
For example, a solvent with potentially serious health effects, such as methylene chloride (a suspected carcinogen) , would receive a solid black rating in the appropriate cell but, as those effects are quite uncertain, the oval might be only be half filled.
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From page 145... ...
. The other was a heuristic hierarchy of process choices (implementation of which frequently entailed changes in design process or product design)
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From page 146... ...
The potential environmental benefits, a reduction in the amount of lead solder from printed wiring boards in waste streams, would accrue primarily to localities near landfills or incinerators in the United States, where the electronic items would be disposed of. The asymmetrical geographic distribution of risk and benefit raises clear equity concerns, but I am aware of no generally accepted methods for resolving them.
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From page 147... ...
Companies are deciding now whether to begin the difficult task of shifting to alternative joining technologies for printed wiring boards, so they will implicitly answer the ethical questions in any event. By failing to implement DEE practices, we are not avoiding problems; we are just ignoring them.
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From page 148... ...
1992a. Industrial ecology: The materials scientist in an environmentally constrained world.
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