Description
Key Learnings
- Learn about calculating the carbon footprint and identifying the environmental impact of your designs, and implementing concrete improvements.
- Learn about collaborating with sustainability experts within your company to improve the environmental performance of your product design.
- Learn how to optimize product design for enhanced environmental performance.
Speaker
JOEL HERHEIJDEN: So hello, everyone, and welcome to this session. My name is Yuri, and I work as a business developer at Pre Sustainability. We are a company based in the Netherlands, focused on sustainability. And today, I'm very delighted to be here to unveil EcoDesigner. It's an accessible web app for sustainable product design that integrates Fusion, Inventor, and Simapro.
So this is a photo of the city of Zwolle in the Netherlands, where I live with my wife and my daughter. And it's a beautiful medieval town. And that church that you see in the picture is called the Peperbus, and it's named after one of these old-fashioned salt and pepper shakers. But enough about Zwolle, because a couple of weeks ago, I was at less of a beautiful site in my hometown, and it's one of the city's waste collection stations. And I came there to bring some of my broken household devices as well as some old phones.
And I walked up to one of those industrial crates, and it was really full of other electronic devices-- coffee machines, printers, and so on. So, and I looked at it, and I said what a waste of materials and a waste of devices. And it was just so many products that still looked OK but probably like my phone, and they were just outdated or unrepairable.
So and the woman standing next to the crate said, so you wouldn't believe how many crates we fill during weekend days. So I said, how much? And she said, it's more than 15. So I was really surprised with the amount in such a small town like Zwolle.
And back in the car, it made me think on just the sheer amount of waste. So back home, I did a little bit of more research, and I found this super interesting report from the United Nations. It's called the "Global E-waste Monitor" from 2024. And they found that us humans in 2022 have collectively generated more than 6 of 2 billion kilograms of e-waste.
Now, and I was really shocked because it's really a mind-boggling number. And it's just really hard to grasp the size and the amount of phones and tablets and machines and refrigerators that this is. And it's mostly coming from consumers, but also very significant amount comes from the industry.
And to put this number in perspective, so you can fill 1.5-- well over 1.5 million trucks, and they could wrap the full equator of the Earth. So that's the amount that we're talking about. So it's huge.
So an e-waste apparently is also the fastest growing solid waste stream, and it grows three times faster than our global population. Now and it's not just only a huge amount, but it also has a very big effect on climate change. So this total amount that we've created in 2022 has emitted as much greenhouse gases as it would take to drive around the equator 12 million times with an average passenger car-- so again, a huge number. And its environmental impact go beyond just carbon because it also poses other negative effects, such as resource depletion, pollution, and also risk to human health. And so it's also important to look at that.
And of course, a large part of this problem is found in the way we consume. E-waste is for a big part a symptom of our own consumption behavior, of course. And that's a problem. But it's not a problem that I want to address in this session today.
E-waste and its impact on the environment is also a symptom of how we design, manufacture, use, and dispose of the products that we use in our society. And that is a topic that I want to address today. So solving e-waste and its environmental impact also involves-- also involves rethinking how we design, manufacture, use and dispose these products.
And we should consider using more sustainable and environmentally friendly materials and for instance, improve on repairability and design for disassembly to enhance recyclability of materials. And these concepts are needed. But it's also very hard to do because, in fact, where do you start in designing more sustainable products?
Now, today, I want to talk to you about ecodesign and how this concept could help in addressing this issue. And I'm also super excited to unveil eco designer-- again, a web app that supports designers and sustainability experts in creating more sustainable products and in doing eco design. So later on, I will give a proper walkthrough to the app, and I will also present our roadmap. And then this time for some questions.
So it's estimated that over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase of the product. So 80%-- that's really a substantial amount. And so this means that the product designers play a key role in designing products with a lower environmental impact. But how can designers do that?
One does not just simply design more sustainable products, because assessing sustainability at the early design phases is very difficult. The design is still evolving and there's a limited amount of data. So assessing it at the end would be much easier.
But then the role for a sustainability expert is just merely environmental bookkeeping. It's just too late to extensively change the design by then. So what's there to do? How can you incorporate sustainability into the early design stages?
Now, a concept that can be used for this is eco design. It's a framework that can guide designers step by step in creating more sustainable products. And it's an approach to design where environmental impact of the product is considered throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to manufacturing, transport, use, and ultimately disposal of the product.
And there's five key concepts within eco design, five main components. So and the first one is selecting more sustainable materials-- so choosing materials with a lower environmental impact, such as renewable materials, recycled materials, or non-toxic resources, and ultimately also with the aim to reduce material use overall. So the second one is to minimize energy and resource consumption-- so designing products and processes to manufacture them that use minimal energy and resources during the production, transportation, and the product's operational life.
The third one is reducing waste and emissions-- so really focusing on reducing waste, pollution, and harmful emissions across the entire life cycle. And fourth one is to design for longevity and durability-- so creating products that have a longer life cycle that are more durable, that are repairable, and ultimately reduce the need for replacements. And as a final step, it's also important to facilitate end-of-life solutions-- so really ensuring that products are designed for disassembly, recycling, and safe disposal, and ultimately to minimize environmental impact at the end of their life cycle.
Now and as you can see in those five key aspects, it's really important, and you really need metrics to be able to back that all up. And as a designer, you want to know for sure that choosing one material over the other does have the desired effect. So and this is where lifecycle assessments come in for support.
So life cycle assessment is a methodology that provides robust and reliable way to obtain the environmental impact of products. So it's a standardized and science-based approach. And it covers the entire life cycle of the product, from raw material extraction to manufacturing to ultimately transporting and distributing the product to the consumer. It takes into account the use phase and ultimately the disposal and recycling.
And it allows you to assess a product early on for more than 21 impact categories. So these are categories that go beyond carbon. And you can think of ozone depletion or its impacts on biodiversity. And there's a whole lot of more impact categories that come out of such analysis.
Now in the company that I work for, Pre Sustainability, we are specialized in doing these types of assessments, doing LCA, and we help companies to turn their sustainability strategy into action. And we do this through fact-based consulting services, training, and software solutions, all based on life cycle thinking. And we also play a very active role in many global sustainability initiatives. Some well-known ones are the UN Life Cycle Initiatives, as well as the European Commission's Environmental Footprint Initiative.
Now in apart form from delivering these consultancy services, we also develop software-- so software that allows sustainability experts to model the products and to obtain those environmental impacts. And this product is called SimaPro. And yeah, it allows LCA experts to based on, for instance, bills of materials and data on processing and transport data on packaging and usage to ultimately obtain the environmental impact. And the cool thing about this platform is that it can be integrated with other software using APIs and therefore allowing other applications to be enriched with environmental footprint data.
So to ultimately make ecodesign a success, it really takes collaboration between two domains. On the one side, it's the design domain, and on the other hand, it's the sustainability and the life cycle assessment domain. So to ultimately make ecodesign work, LCA experts and designers will have to collaborate closely in iterations throughout the design process. Now, an LCA specialist can provide data to designers about the environmental metrics, and they can support in giving insights into the sustainability and environmental impact of specific materials in how certain design choices will influence the overall environmental impact-- yeah, advise in how to reduce environmental harm throughout the entire life cycle of the product.
And in the past year, together with Autodesk and our partner Prototech and Torpedo, we have developed EcoDesigner, and EcoDesigner is a web app that integrates Autodesk Fusion, Inventor, and SimaPro, and it's really designed to support designers and LCA experts to do eco design. So EcoDesigner allows designers to easily assess their drawings, and it also allows the LCA experts to support the designers with LCA calculations and proper data.
And with EcoDesigner, designers will get insights into multiple impact categories. And to start with, we've implemented global warming, land use, and water use, but SimaPro supports more than 21 impact categories. And these can also be obtained.
Now and how it works is designers can assess the drawings for a first initial assessment. And then based on this baseline calculation, they can go back into the design and start to adjust, for instance, for more sustainable materials, to use less materials, to change the design to make it more durable, and anything that basically comes out of this analysis and then can help improve.
And then in the second iteration, the designer can use eco design again to assess the improvements and see how the improvements are affecting the overall environmental impact. So how we set up EcoDesigner is as follows. So EcoDesigner is a standalone web application, and it's fully integrated using APIs with Fusion and Autodesk Platform Services. So the drawings that live in Fusion are automatically loaded into EcoDesigner. And we also have a manual import for Inventor files, and both types of drawings are loaded into eco designer and can be viewed in a 3D mode.
And you can then press Calculate and then EcoDesigner will fetch a bill of a bill of materials from the drawings, and we'll send that bill of materials to SimaPro. And then in SimaPro, a mapping between the Autodesk default material library and emission factors that come from eco invent, specific database for that. And based on the bill of materials and those mappings, we can calculate the environmental impact of the design. And that's then again being sent back to eco design and to be assessed to be viewed by the designer.
Now as an additional step, you're also able to store back the results into the Fusion model. And I will show that also later on how we managed to do that. So now it's time for the proper walkthrough, and I've prepared a video for that.
So on screen, you see a default, one of the demo models within Fusion. It's a utility knife. And the users of EcoDesigner can then go to the web app and log in via their Autodesk credentials. The user signs in and then allows EcoDesigner to fetch their data from Autodesk Platform Services.
Now, on the left side here, you see a list of the drawings that are available. In this case, I have a whole list. And these are based on the drawings that are linked to the user's account.
So I can go and click on the utility knife, and then EcoDesigner will load the design. So it's the same design as seen in Fusion. And it has a proper 3D view to inspect the model and to see what it's all about. And then using the Calculate Impact button, the EcoDesigner will fetch the bill of materials and then send that over to SimaPro.
So once the calculation is done, SimaPro sends back the results, and then the results can be viewed in this report mode. So in this case, you see that the utility knife overall has an impact of 4.17kg CO2 equivalent and in the global warming impact category. And EcoDesigner does not only give the environmental impact for the overall product, but you can also zoom into the various components of the design. So as you can see, I can obtain the data for the blade and the body and all the other components in the model.
So EcoDesigner also stores the report history and the user can also utilize this functionality to compare various versions of the utility knife. So in this case, we have a baseline model. And well, we can see that, for instance, later on, the grip has a very high environmental impact.
So in Fusion, you can then go and adjust the material and then do another calculation and then compare its results using this screen. The user is also able to export the results into a PDF file for using in all sorts of meetings or for archive purposes. And as a last step, I'm sorry for that.
So as a last step, the user is also able to view a heat map. And this heat map shows which components have the highest environmental impact. So like I said, in this case, it's the grip.
And this functionality also has an explode mode. So you can really explode the whole model to also have a look at the components that might live inside of the model. And this functionality really guides and helps the designer to easily see which components have a very high environmental impact.
Now as a last step, the user is able to store back the results into the actual Fusion drawing. So you can write it back, and then in Fusion, the same data can be seen under the properties of the model-- so apologies for that. Yep, so you can see under the Properties, it says sustainability and powered by SimaPro.
And you can click that open, fold that open, and it will give you the environmental impact of the model as a whole. But it will also store the environmental impact of the various separate components. And this allows designers to really store that data close to the drawing, close to the actual design. And this can be exported to other systems and for really a common understanding of the environmental impact of the product.
I just want to show what the workflow looks like for importing in vendor files. It's a feature that will be published and released into EcoDesigner very soon, shortly after Autodesk University. So the user can click on Upload File. You can then select your invented drawing.
Ecodesign will then upload your drawing onto Autodesk Platform Services, and you're then able to use the drawing similar to the workflow that I've just shown you. So that's really nice that you can both use Fusion and Inventor models to ultimately assess the designs for environmental impact.
So that's the walkthrough. I now want to spend a couple of seconds on a roadmap. So EcoDesigner is fully in development. And one of the first features is that we want to add to EcoDesigner is the possibility to add data for manufacturing, the use phase and end of life of the product. So currently, we only do a material analysis, but of course, if you want to assess the whole life cycle of the product and to really support ecodesign in those phases, and we're going to add these types of insights to be added as well.
Another feature that we're developing is a company-specific material database. So there are a lot of companies, of course, that have their own proprietary materials, or they might have very specific data on their supply chain. And in SimaPro, we can accommodate the use of that company-specific data as well. So we will also want to make that available in ecodesign.
One of the other features is also give the designer some suggestions on materials that are more sustainable while maintaining the same characters and characteristics of the material-- so really to guide and support them and their designer in choosing more sustainable products. And ultimately, also, we want to add features that really foster the collaboration between designers and LCA experts, such as being able to leave comments in the results file and in the 3D file to really work together and collaborate to improve the environmental impact.
So that was it. Thank you for your attention, and I would like to invite you to download EcoDesigner today. And we're really curious about your experiences with it. So we're really happy to learn from that. And you can scan this QR code for more information, also to where to download.
Eco design will be available in the Autodesk App Store. And there's also some upgrading possibilities there, which will be shown on that website. And if you have any questions, I'm all ears, and you can reach out to me personally and after this presentation. Thank you.