EMS622U Sustainability Assessment for Product Design Report Coursework Question

Aim: To conduct a sustainability assessment for a product of your choosing.

1. Choose a product to conduct a sustainability assessment:

• This can be any product or process of your choice!
• You will need to explain why you chose it, e.g., why it is important to study its sustainability and/or why it is important to you.

2. Choose a comparator product to compare results:

• You can either conduct an assessment of this comparable product or collect existing data on it if it exists.
• It should provide a similar purpose/product, and you need to be careful about making a fair comparison (e.g., scope of your study, similar product, accounting for different life spans).

3. Choose 4 sustainability ‘indicators’ that you will investigate/quantify:

• At least 1 of each category: environmental, economic, and social.

4. Conduct a sustainability assessment:

• Use the broad LCA methodology to conduct an environmental assessment with at least 1 environmental indicator (preferably more) (e.g., climate change, human toxicity, water footprint, acidification potential… see lecture slides for a full list of indicators).

• Define the goal and scope:

• Goal
• Scope, boundary, cut-off points, cradle-to-grave or gated process.

• Collect data for your inventory:

• Across each life cycle stage that you are considering, collect data on environmental inputs and outputs (including mass and energy requirements, pollution, and waste).
• Where no data is available, make assumptions using your engineering judgment and record these assumptions for further sensitivity analysis.

• Conduct an impact assessment:

• Combine emissions to estimate the total contribution to your environmental indicator (e.g., climate change using CO2 equivalents GWP).
• Quantify total emissions across each stage.

• Interpretation:

• Identify the ‘hotspots’ of emissions in your life cycle.
• What are the largest emissions and the key sources?
• How does it compare to your comparator product?
• Would a product/technology switch from your comparator product be appropriate?
• How could the environmental impacts be reduced, e.g., by changing materials, changing processes (e.g., reducing energy), choosing a different energy source, or a changed design?

• Conduct an economic assessment:

• Collect data in a similar way to your environmental assessment and make assumptions where necessary.
• Estimate the total economic cost of your product, identifying the largest contributors to cost.
• You may choose an estimation methodology that includes net-present value, discounting, financing decisions… it depends on the product what is most appropriate.

5. Sensitivity analysis:

• Identify the key data sources that might affect your results.
• What is the quality of your data source/assumptions made?
• Conduct a sensitivity analysis to investigate how much of an impact would a different assumption make on your results (e.g., if some data points were doubled or halved, what would be the knock-on impact of your results? Would it change preference for which technology to choose?).

6. Incorporation into design:

• Compare the 4 sustainability indicators and discuss the preference for your technology over the comparator… what is better and what is worse? Are any of your sustainability indicators more important, and would you ‘weigh’ them differently in your comparison (e.g., prioritizing climate change over something else)? You could use multi-criteria decision analysis to quantify this comparison (to be covered in the final weeks of the semester).
• Make recommendations for the improvement of the product and discuss the impact of these improvements on your result:

• Could relate to the design, using different materials.
• How could the improvements be made? Does it need a policy/regulation change to get companies to change their design? Or is it cost-effective to do so anyway?

7. Conclusions:

• Summarize your findings.
• Define key conclusions that arise from your analysis.
• Suggest whether further work is needed to improve the analysis.
• Summarize recommendations for improvement of the product.

CW1 Project Interim Presentation

• 4-5 min narrating slides.
• What are you studying?
• What is the product?
• What are you comparing to?
• Why did you choose it? What is the importance or why did you personally choose it?
• What current studies have found and how will you use these/tweak these to differentiate your study?
• Clarify selection of product, comparator product, and selection of 4 sustainability indicators.
• Detail the data sources that will be relied upon.
• Present preliminary results.
• Suggest improvements and further work to improve the study.
• Results created so far.

CW2: Sustainability Report

• Full report on your sustainability assessment.
• Environmental assessment including life cycle.
• Economic assessment.
• Social assessment.
• Comparison of sustainability indicators.
• Recommendations for improvement to design to improve sustainability.