Sustainable Manufacturing Starts with Responsible Design

JEFF HIGGINS: Hi, and welcome to sustainable manufacturing starts with responsible design. Today, I'm joining you with my colleague and friend here, Dr. Matt Jaworski. My name is Jeff Higgins and we are senior solution engineers here at Autodesk.

A quick little background on us. I'll start with myself. Just a process engineer that happened to end up in the simulation space. And this thing of sustainability keeps coming up in our space and we thought we ought to talk about it a little bit. Matt.

MATT JAWORSKI: Yeah, as Jeff said, Matt Jaworski. Jeff and I have known each other for many years now, right, Jeff?

JEFF HIGGINS: That's what I'm told.

MATT JAWORSKI: Yeah, and also have a background in plastics engineering but started more on the design side. So I think we'll go ahead and get started. Let's start setting the stage, Jeff. What do we have first?

JEFF HIGGINS: Before we get too far into this, I'm just going to put the Safe Harbor Statement out there. We are going to talk about some technologies today. I don't think we're going to get into anything that isn't already existing technology. But just in case we do, the Safe Harbor Statement, just don't make any buying decisions based on anything we're talking about technology-wise today.

We are trying to just shape some of this conversation for you. So if you're really interested in it, feel free to read all the legalese that's on the slide. But I think that pretty much covers the gist of it.

So just to get us started, I want to set the stage a little bit here for us with a quick description. And it's very simple. We're just going to describe a scenario. I want you guys just to think about it for a quick second. And it starts with just walking into a room.

Just imagine you're walking into a room for the very first time. But at the end of the room, you see a stranger there and he's wearing a mask. And he's also holding a knife in the middle of the room. And in front of him on a bed, you see an unconscious woman.

What image do you have in your mind right now? What is your gut reaction to do when you get this description? Well, I gave you a very factual description and you probably got a pretty emotional response. What I technically described to you was a medical operating room. Even though it is a factual description there is a man wearing a mask standing over an unconscious woman who is laid out on a table.

It is a good situation. And that, ironically, is kind of the same situation that we ended up a lot of times when we're talking about sustainability. We get a very emotional response to something that is a very factual description. So what we're going to try and do today is demystify a little bit of that emotional response, get back to the factual description, and hopefully, shape a little bit of this conversation for you as we're getting into this.

So quick thing that I like to do anytime I get into one of these conversations that are brand new to me, I like to look up some definitions. Ironically, usually, I like one definition. This time, I kind of like them all. I looked up sustainability in several places.

And the Cambridge Dictionary said, sustainability is the ability to be maintained or continued, or to be able to be kept at the same level for a certain amount of time. The Oxford Dictionary said it's the ability to maintain at a certain level or even to be upheld or defended.

So these are all things that we should keep in mind as we start getting into this concept of sustainability. That's really what we're after. We're trying to get to a point where we can maintain our world, our environment at a certain level. We're not taking more away. We're not adding too much negativity to that space.

So in the conversation, we have to start with something. And typically, starting with materials is a great place to go. This is something that we deal with all the time. And as a matter of fact, here's a couple of really quick images, some of these that hit home for me very specifically. What really happens when we talk about recycling? What does that really mean?

Well, this is something I fought for in the neighborhood that I live in is to get recycling into our neighborhood. And one of the very first things we saw, even though this picture isn't of my neighborhood, we saw this very same thing happening. We saw the garbage truck coming around picking up the waste and dumping the recycling into the truck with it.

So the very first thing we did is we had to correct this problem. But what really happens when we start talking about recycling? Are we actually getting things to go into the places we want them to go? Just because we say we're recycling, is it really getting there?

I like the image of the paper straw too. And my wife calls this my personal vendetta against paper straws. I'm not a big fan of them. I know what they're made out of. But this is a great example. I actually know the container that this is off of.

But here's your green movement in one snapshot, a paper straw in a plastic wrapper. Just think about that for a second. It completely defeats the point of what you're going after. And I want to concentrate for a quick second at this lower right image. Both Matt and I grew up in Pennsylvania. And this little town called Centralia, Pennsylvania is probably one of the weirdest little towns and the start of many horror stories and movies that you've probably seen in Hollywood.

Matt, I don't know if you've ever actually been to Centralia, have you traveled there before I tell the story?

MATT JAWORSKI: No, I haven't yet. But definitely, I've heard the stories that you're going to tell.

JEFF HIGGINS: It's on my bucket list too. I keep telling my wife we're going to go. But Centralia, Pennsylvania started its life as a little coal town. And like many things in the 60s and 70s, as they took their waste over to the landfills, they had to have some mechanism for maintaining the size of the landfill.

The state actually had rules and regulations. And the way that they maintained the size of the garbage in the landfill was just a set fire to it. So they would burn it off over a certain amount of time to keep the size of the landfill down. Unfortunately, at one point, what ended up happening was they set one of the coal veins under the town on fire. And if you know anything about coal, it's a very slow hot burn for a very long time.

Created a lot of problems. As you can see there heated up the roads, created a lot of Earth movement, a lot of cracks in the roads, and a lot of health problems for the residents so much so that they ended up having to be bought out by the state. A lot of folks moved out.

Of course, they couldn't be forced out. But you can see the difference there between what that town looked like in the 70s, and just a decade later what that town looked like in the 80s. It's a very substantial difference.

So when we talk about sustainability on multiple levels, I know this hits home personally for me, and I think it does for you too, Matt.

MATT JAWORSKI: Yeah, definitely.

JEFF HIGGINS: So here's another one. So we get into this conversation a lot about alternative materials. Changing going to natural resources for a lot of these things. And one of the biggest things that I definitely want to hit on is natural resources are useful.

But keep in mind, when we say natural resources, they're also limited. We only have a certain supply of these. And in order to maintain our environment, we are typically going to have to find some type of sustainable option instead of consuming things out of our environment.

One of the things that hit home for me as I was doing some of these searches many years ago was this piece that we have here from the Living Urn. 27,000 trees are consumed a day to produce toilet paper. Yeah, I paused there for a second just to let that sink in. 27,000 trees a day. And the alternative to, say, plastic bags in your grocery stores are to go paper.

How many more trees are we going to have to consume to get paper bags back into grocery stores? And how many other things are we going to try to replace with paper? We need to start thinking about what it's going to take to not necessarily consume more out of our environment, but what does it mean to design something that can be reused in our environment? Whether it's material or the actual product itself. We need to focus on reusables and stop throwing things away.

So since I've brought this conversation up of plastics, Matt, my background is plastics. My degree is in plastics engineering, so is yours. When I say plastics, how do you feel?

MATT JAWORSKI: Well, for us, it's a different terminology, right? I go back to, Jeff, when we first were getting into the plastics. We heard all about the Dustin Hoffman getting the lecture on plastics are the future. That's where I go to.

JEFF HIGGINS: I hate to say it, I think we need to get back to that. We need Dustin Hoffman as our spokesperson again. Plastics should be the future. But we need to focus on what people think when we do this conversation of plastic.

And by the way, our conversation today is not focused on plastic, but I want everybody to think about this. If you do a Google search on plastic, this is what shows up. This is literally the Google search I did on my computer when I typed in the word plastic.

And those are some pretty scary images. I mean, I'm looking at water bottles consuming our land, our water, our space. I'm looking at plastic everywhere. And it is a pretty scary concept.

But one of the things that you've got to keep in mind here is it's not necessarily the material's fault that all of these things are here. These are some pretty scary concepts, right? I mean, we're talking about pollution, water bottles, waste.

And the very first thing that comes up for everybody is we need to ban all this. We need to ban these materials out of our environment because they're destroying our environment. Well, that's true.

But if we take a slightly different position on it and look at something like recycling, plastics are 100% recyclable, meaning we have the opportunity to not consume anything out of our environment and continue to reuse these materials. We can also use these materials for packaging, for safety, for sanitary reasons to keep things away from germs and to keep things prepared for us.

We can also look at this from an environmental perspective. How can we use these things to protect our environment? But we have to be very conscious about what we're doing with these materials in order to do that.

Now, I bring this up because as we get into other types of materials, these are often things that we hear. Everything should be recyclable. We need to spend-- we need to do more with materials, we need to do more with metals. Well, just like plastics, not all metals are created equal either.

For example, these are just some quotes out there to help alliterate the fact that your aluminum cans that you drink your soda out of or your beer, they are not recyclable to the point of being able to use them for other types of products, meaning I can't take an aluminum can and use it for the body of an aluminum vehicle. It's not the same.

You wouldn't want to use this can material for your aircraft. It's not high quality, high tensile strength aluminum. And that's one of the things we have to be very conscious of is where are these materials being used and how can we reuse them. Even though I am in a tin can when I'm flying in an airplane, I don't want to be in one of those tin cans.

So quick concept here. These are just a couple of really quick things just to show what we're talking about when we say alternative materials. If we take certain materials out of our environment, things that people are very scared of, again, that emotional response to a factual description, we can take a look at what that alternative is.

So for example, if I take these three things, a comb, a jacket, and a piano, basically, the keys of the piano, and say I want to take the plastic out of those and I want to use a natural resource to replace them, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about going back to killing tortoises to harvest their shells to make combs. I'm talking about going back to killing cute little foxes and minxes and cute little animals to make our coats again.

And for God's sake, we don't have enough elements out there to make the piano keys that we need to make. Those ivory tusks are better made out of plastic, trust me. So think about what those alternatives mean.

But also think about this for a second. The materials that we're talking about can be completely reused. If we're talking about plastic, and we'll focus on plastic here for a second because I do have a background there, a lot of these plastic materials, even if they are a single use product, does not mean they are a single use material.

Oftentimes, the plastic bags that you get from the grocery store, if they're not being ground up and reused or remade into plastic bags, they can be made into other things. I know one of the local churches that I go to uses the plastic bags to make mats for homeless.

The plastic water bottles that you drink your water and your soda out of can be re-extruded or cut up and extruded into filament for 3D printers. And Matt, think this one was very creative over here on the side. Tell us a little bit about that image.

MATT JAWORSKI: Yeah, well that one actually came about from when my kids were in school. A lot of the work that we did in crafts and arts was actually made out of plastic materials and things that are pretty common in the household. So I just put that image there to show that there is a reuse aspect of it.

And like Jeff said, we can also try to recycle those materials and put them into making other recycled park benches, for instance, or lumber can be recycled. But just know that it's not always a single use. There's always something that could be reused.

As the plastics industry, or the material, get a bad name because it's such a visible-- the litter itself, it's a very visible thing and plastics can float. But all these things can actually be reused. So they can be very useful if we think about it in those terms of how can we continue to make a circularity with the material and bring it back to a use that can be good for the next generation.

JEFF HIGGINS: Party on, brother. So think sustainability again for a second as we start talking about a couple of these things. And there are definitely advantages, in some cases, to certain types of materials for certain applications. I don't want to discount that.

But one of the big ones that comes up all the time, again, are these plastic water bottles. We have to focus on this one because this is a big deal. We've designed plastic water bottles to be about a tenth of the weight of a glass bottle. For that reason, it has a lot of advantages. It has shipping advantages, it has size advantages, it's got tons of advantages over its counterpart, which is glass.

The really sad part to that is what we're doing with it, it's very visible. The buoyancy of it in water makes it float. It makes it very visible in many cases so that you can see it. Not picking on Jeff Foxworthy, but he had a great joke when I was a kid that talked about throwing your beer cans in the water. And he said, for God's sake, if you're going to throw them in the water, fill them up first so they sink to the bottom.

We don't have those days anymore. And I don't encourage you doing that, either, by the way. Do not start sinking cans in the bottom of the water-- of your land or water masses either because I said this. It's all a bad idea. But it's very visible with plastic.

So let's take a look at this for a quick second. What happens if we take these glass bottles? These glass bottles that are right here are, again, 10 times the weight of a plastic bottle, which means that I have to ship these back empty to refill them with something else, to recycle them, to clean them out. Not only I have to worry about the cleaning process, but I have to worry about the shipping process.

I've got the CO2 emissions that go with it to ship these back at 10 times the weight plus the size plus the fact that I'm mostly shipping air when I ship glass bottles back. I'm not going to grind these up or pulverize these in order to do that.

The interesting part is the counterpart to this, that little box you see up in the corner that says pellets, is the plastic bottles. So not only are they lighter, I can actually grind them up and remanufacture them at almost no environmental impact, meaning that I can ship these back with way more of these in one truck. I can ship them back at much less weight. And I can remake them into anything. I can make more water bottles or I can make something else out of that same material that is equally as appropriate.

I know I've harped on the paper bags quite a bit. And I like paper bags. I just don't like paper bags at my grocery store. And the reason for that isn't because I dislike paper bags. It's because I understand the environmental impact that these are bringing to us as well.

Not only are we talking about cutting down more trees in order to make these, they take up seven times the space of the equivalent number of plastic bags on top of the additional weight. Again, we're talking additional CO2 emissions to ship and additional impact on our environment.

So when we start talking sustainability, there are many levels of this that we have to focus on. Not just the material itself, but what are the impacts of recycling the different types of material? How are we going to recycle them? What is the impact to the environment?

A great one is the paper factory that we were very close to in college, Matt. We went to the same college, as a matter of fact. Will not call them out by name. But I will call out the smell that we could smell for miles around. It smelled like a giant fart in the city. Yes, I said giant fart.

But that is the end result. And there are tons of chemicals that go into bleaching paper to make it white. And white is not a natural color for wood. It's typically a brownish, tannish color. So you've got to bleach it out to get to those things. So there are significant environmental impacts when we start talking about those.

Not only that, the CO2 emissions, the carbon emissions, the general pollution from foundries when we're talking about metal versus, say, injection molding over here where we have to consider the fact that we do have some metal pieces to this as well to make these. We have the manufacturing of the molds. We have the water consumption that we've got to get into. So there are environmental impacts to consider there as well too. None of these are perfect situations, but we have to weigh all the alternatives.

So sustainability and business challenges. Done a lot of talking here, Matt. I think I need a little break from this. Can you tell us a little bit about this part of it?

MATT JAWORSKI: All right, yeah, I think what's interesting, and maybe, one of the reasons why a lot of people decided to go to this at AU and actually look at this video after the fact is sustainability is a very hot topic. And I think there's a lot of pressures on companies.

So I think people are looking for information on how they can help with sustainability. And also, there's a lot of pressures that businesses and companies-- definitely customers of Autodesk are facing.

So we see three of those right here. One, consumers. A lot of the consumers, as Jeff said, previous generations may not be as environmentally conscious as some of the ones that we're seeing now. And they're demanding that the products be made more sustainable, out of more sustainable materials, and also that the company itself is more sustainable. So there's pressures there.

The companies that are getting investment or injections of funds in order to fund their research and also the health of the company need to also consider this topic as well. Because typically, the companies that are embracing sustainability are the ones that are also getting more money.

And then, finally, legislation. Jeff talked about a lot of the plastics pollution and the first thing that you saw on the Google search, or at least the third thing on there, was what? Ban. Just ban it. That's how we get rid of it.

Well, I think if we have legislation in place, we're going to have to look at ways to be more sustainable as well as companies. Can we set up recovery programs? Can we set up other things? So in the next slide, we kind of go over how businesses are really addressing sustainability.

It's interesting. A few years ago, the United Nations came up with 17 sustainable goals to try to transform different areas of sustainability. And those goals are the foundation of what companies are actually being measured against.

So whether they're developing their own sustainable development goals or looking at ratings in terms of a system like environmental, social, and governance, ratings, or ESG for short. You can set up a lot of goals that are related to those and then have some sort of common language between different industries and different markets and even different geographical locations.

Another thing that customers and companies are really embracing is the fact of carbon offsets and those types of things. If we look at where from a few recent studies or surveys how companies are embracing sustainability, I think these numbers really speak for themselves.

78% of companies in automotive, electronics, food and agriculture, health care are adopting a circular economy framework. And this is what we're talking about with recycling. And Jeff talked about, how do we actually get all these trees, but also then have trees for the next generation of products? Trees don't grow that quick.

So we have to figure out how to use materials so that we can continue to use them in a circular fashion so that generations to come can use those same products, but also not destroy the environment. And we see 73% with an internal Autodesk study with our customers of manufacturing companies have sustainability as part of their strategic goals.

So if you look on their websites or look at their impact statements, 3/4 of them are actually already adopting this. So it's definitely not just a buzzword. It's a movement, and definitely a good one, and something that Jeff and I are really supporting, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to do this presentation.

Go ahead, Jeff.

JEFF HIGGINS: No, no, no, you go.

MATT JAWORSKI: No, I was just going to say so we talked about materials, we talked about how customers and the industry is kind of looking at and starting to embrace sustainability.

But the title of this presentation was it starts with design. So the next thing we're going to talk about is design. But I think before we do that, an interesting picture here. So Jeff, I have a picture of a tree. Does that look like a healthy tree or a sick tree? What do you think?

JEFF HIGGINS: It does not look healthy to me, Matt. Looks like bad things are going on.

MATT JAWORSKI: All right, it may maybe or may not. So if you click on the next slide here, I think what's interesting when you look at sustainability is-- and Jeff focused on a lot of these topics.

If you look at one thing, it may not give you the entire picture. So that tree may be the last of its kind in the forest, or it may be just one of many of a thriving forest that we have. It may be sick on the backside, but it looks great on the front. Or as Jeff said, it looks like somebody brushed up against this tree maybe a little bit. But it still looks OK.

The point of what I'm trying to make here is you should look at not just one thing with sustainability, but the entire process from the start of the process of a product all the way through to its end of life. And that's what we call a life cycle assessment.

So looking at it from that mentality, go ahead, Jeff. We can actually go in and look at a specific topic of possibly injection molding. And how doing upfront simulation or different types of workflows throughout that process of the life cycle can actually help us by creating a more sustainable product.

So whether it's in design or manufacturing or different manufacturing methods, the use of alternative materials or natural fillers, how we distribute it from a transportation standpoint, are we using fossil fuels for that or are we using electric or more renewable resources like wind or solar? Can we nest the product such that we can actually get more? Jeff talked about the weight aspect of it as well. How dense a material is versus another one. That has a big impact on the CO2 output and the impact to the environment from a transportation perspective.

And then, finally, disposal. Can we actually design this product so it can be disassembled so that the materials that are in it can be put back into a more circular economy and reduce what's going into the landfill so we don't have another Centralia, PA where we're trying to burn it in and get actually more emissions from an incineration?

And the reason why we start with design is, if you look at the breakdown of the global greenhouse gas emissions, what we make is the biggest portion of where the greenhouse gases come from. And of that, 80% of the design of those products is embedded in the first stage in design. So that's why we really have to focus on design. And that's why it's the focus of this presentation.

So given those facts, Jeff, what are some areas of where we could actually make an impact if we look at design?

JEFF HIGGINS: There are a bunch of areas, Matt. And I'm glad you touched on a lot of the business aspect of this. Because that's what design is really sort of targeted at going after here. Now, we can look at this from a very conventional perspective of just conventional optimizations. Optimize for size, structure, rigidity, or lightweighting.

That's typically what we like to term is like a level one sustainability focus. It's getting the weight down, getting the material usage down, getting things optimized a bit more. But as we get further into the levels, like a two, three, four, and five, we're looking more at optimizing these materials for use for their source. How reusable or how recyclable are they?

And what are we looking at as far as transportation emissions? All things that you touched on as we were getting into this. So let's start by looking at the basics. If we focus on some of these things, we can definitely focus on optimizing shapes. And even within the technologies that we have at Autodesk today, we can do those very things. We can take an existing shape and we can just reduce the overall weight so that if we're looking at something for its application, say, it's going into some form of transportation, where the weight of the component being moved is going to create CO2 emissions. We can look at optimizing the weight structure and function at that point.

If we're looking a bit more in detail to it, we can even look at material alternatives as well. But what I want to get everybody thinking about isn't just taking weight out of a component. But actually, starting at the concept of design. Design it with a new concept in mind.

We talk a lot at Autodesk about generative design, but this is one of the first times it opened up my eyes to what does it really mean to be able to manufacture things in a different way? And there's a really interesting study here, the Hopkinson Dickens study on the cost model. And they do this to compare injection molding to additive manufacturing.

The concept of this is, at some point, there's a break even. Meaning if I'm going to produce enough of these parts, you can see on the curve there that the cost for the part or the cost per part is going to go down at some point based on the ability to manufacture it.

Whereas, if I stay with additive manufacturing, that cost stays consistent the whole time. Because in injection molding, we have things like the mold cost, the machine cost, the hourly rates of the machine. All of those are variable that can be built into the number of parts and amortized out over the overall production run.

I would also argue that there's a good argument to be made in here for the CO2 emissions as well. Meaning that initially with injection molding, we would have some significantly higher CO2 emissions, making the mold, getting the steel, getting all those pieces developed for this.

But at some point, if we've got a longer production run with more parts, the CO2 emissions are going to dwindle way, way down. Whereas, in some other alternative manufacturing methods, they might stay higher or not reduce as fast. So we need to explore manufacturing options. We need to explore the part for design options. And we need to make sure that we're exploring all materials for things like biodegradability and reusability.

One of the big pushes that I have with my family internally here in the Michigan area where I live is reusable components, reusable bottles, reusable things that are not being shipped all over God's green Earth. Are there ways that we can minimize our overall impact?

And think about it from a size perspective as well. If we're doing things like shipping glass bottles that are mostly shipping air, well, how much are we really wasting? The packaging and the reuse of that packaging becomes critical.

So I want to take a minute here just to look at some of these design alternatives. If we look at this component, you can see three different design alternatives here and the relative cost that goes with each one. For a quick example, you can see that the suspension component here we have for this bike, if we did it with a 3 axis tool, we could actually reduce the weight down from the overall manufactured cost It'd be about 2.3kg. It would cost us about $145 to produce this. And it would have a safety factor of about 2.3, which is pretty good. It's somewhere in the ballpark of where we want to be.

If we wanted to take this to, say, a 2 and 1/2 axis CNC process, you notice that we could still get the weight down, not quite as much. We're at about 3 kilograms now. It has a safety factor of 2.7 and cost us about $160. But if we made all of these out of additive manufacturing, we really wouldn't be that much further ahead. They'd cost us about $418 a component. Our safety factor would be lower, although our weight would be a little bit less.

This is a great concept of being able to weigh the alternatives and what the overall impact is. Does it make sense to go to a 3 axis machining process? Does it make more sense to stick with a 2 and 1/2 axis?

I would say, in this case, although I love additive manufacturing, this is probably not the solution that I want to go with. It's going to take a lot of time, a lot of material, and it's going to cost me a lot. So we can balance this out and get pretty close to where we need to be within the human design of this, or we can go one step further into the generative design, take a little bit more weight out of it, and reduce the cost even further and go to a 3 axis process.

So look at those alternatives. Weigh those out. Identify what that means. And I want to call out here, Matt, not a plastic part. Just saying.

MATT JAWORSKI: Finally. Finally. I mean, we're getting outside of our comfort zone here. I think what's awesome about this, Jeff, is the manufacturing awareness of it. So if we look at another example, and I'm going to go back to plastics, Jeff. I'm sorry.

JEFF HIGGINS: That's all right.

MATT JAWORSKI: But if we ask the question from that generative design software is, can you find a solution to support the weight of the person sitting in there but use the minimum amount of material and energy to make it the most sustainable design? And that's really what happened here with the designer Starck and the manufacturer and distributor of the product Kartell.

So what they did is they took it through Autodesk Generative Design as an example and was able to come up with this very nice looking design. But also used 100% recycled material in order to manufacture. So again, using a product that probably was not going to get reused made it recyclable.

And then, used the generative design from a manufacturing aware standpoint, like you just pointed out, to be able to be injection molded. And the combination of those two things, basically, created the world's first computer generated chair with artificial intelligence.

And we see that here. If you have enough money, you can go and by one over at Kartell, Jeff. I think they have to ship them over from Germany though, so it's probably going to be a little expensive.

JEFF HIGGINS: We might want to consider the CO2 emissions, but it's a good idea.

MATT JAWORSKI: I agree. The second example that we have here is from Panasonic. They had a fan impeller blade. Were having some issues with the design. And we, basically, looked at the same generative software. But rather than looking at the product itself looked at the fluid side and used generative fluids to take away the areas that would normally cool this inside of injection mold and give us a cooling path that was the most efficient.

But also, that gave us the best quality part. Because as Jeff and I both know, the more efficient that you can cool a part, the more product that you can do from a product generation standpoint or production standpoint. But secondarily, if we have a differential cooling, that's going to also cause problems. And if we have a fan blade that was designed to be a certain shape and then it distorts or warps out of that shape, it's not going to be as efficient.

So we see a couple of examples of how this generative fluids made a more conformal cooling. And if we look at the next slide, we see that this actually saved them about 20% versus the method that they were using before. These are three-dimensional 3D printed inserts from a powder bed laser sintering process.

But I think what's interesting about this is it gives us a new way to design the molds or inserts that go into a traditional injection mold such that it's more efficient because we can get more productivity out of the mold itself. The product itself has a better quality. And we can actually make a more sustainable product even with the same materials that they were using from before.

And I think the last example here is an interesting one from Trane Technologies. So it's a company that typically does HVAC or air conditioning, ventilation type of products. A lot of times, when people think sustainability, they think it's going to cost more money, and that may be true.

But the interesting part about what Trane did is they looked at the entire process, that lifecycle that we talked about before, and said, how can we impact this and look at it not just in terms of return on investment, but also on sustainability side or how well it is going to perform in the environment?

So they looked at a bunch of different methods. And if we look at the next slide, they focused on all those different areas of the entire design through manufacturing process. And they were able to reduce parts by consolidating them, which improved the logistics because we don't have five different things that we have to then come and assemble.

It actually reduced the weight of the products because now five products are combined into one. They were able to use a material that was a recycled material. Able to do a different process that actually saved both material and the actual pressure that it took to manufacture.

And from the conformal cooling or the generative fluids that we just talked about, they were able to actually reduce the cooling of that part as well. And do what took three molds with just one. And all of that really translated to the end result here, which if we go to the next slide, we see over 3.1 million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions were reduced.

And not only that, the energy savings were very significant, as you see on here, because we were able to do what three machines did with one now for the same production that saved or gave the ability for us to make other products with those machines and actually use a lower tonnage type of machine. And it reduced the park cost quite a bit.

The other thing that was interesting is it took 50% off the actual development process as well. Because they didn't have to go in and redo or groom the tools or make modifications or engineering change requests. So even though we're talking about sustainability, this actually makes a lot of sense for the company as well in terms of return on investment.

So Jeff, I think there's another area that you wanted to go over that goes over some perception issues with paint.

JEFF HIGGINS: Yeah, it's an interesting one. In fact, it's a little bit of a challenge that to some of our folks out there in Autodesk land. Meaning that we're getting into the conversation now of what are we doing to our materials. Not just how recyclable are they, but how are we going to start treating them so that they are recyclable?

One of the biggest issues we have, and Matt, you know this. I live in the Detroit area. Love cars. Love everything about cars. Love the engines. Love that we're going electric. Love it all.

But one of the biggest challenges is this concept of perceived quality. And a lot of times, we do things to our materials, mainly, in many cases, either metals or plastics that make it difficult to recycle them. In the case of the automotive industry, we spend a lot of time painting our plastics. So we treat them, we paint them, we coat them, we prime them. All of this makes it much more difficult to recycle that material because in order to get back to the core material, all of that has to get stripped off.

Same thing is true with our metals, our metals that we chrome, we get into the same process. You've got multiple materials. In order to get those, you have to melt them back down, take the different layers of materials apart, and it's very, very difficult.

So a lot of times, those materials, which are highly recyclable, are getting thrown into landfills. So like I said, Matt, this is the challenge. There is this whole movement on Instagram. If you check this out there's a hashtag for it called paint is dead. And a lot of auto companies are starting to investigate this now too where we can get to a point where we are putting removable coatings, vinyl, in many cases, on top of our body components.

They're researching now getting into composite body panels. Putting wraps on top of them. Not only does this offer the ability now to get some very creative and colorful exteriors, but also, some very, very creative and artistic exteriors. Matt, you would look great in the Incredible Hulk Car there in the corner.

MATT JAWORSKI: Hulk smash.

JEFF HIGGINS: Exactly. So that that's one of the biggest challenges. I mean, we've got to focus on what we're doing to these materials. So this is the challenge. Focus on that. Focus on what we can do for perceived quality. How do we change our manufacturing process to achieve that same perceived quality in the raw materials so that we can reuse it?

The core of what we're getting to today is that all of this change we're talking about is just to drive the awareness because it all starts with us. It starts with the people. It's not about what these materials do. The materials by themselves really don't hurt anything. It's how we treat them and what we're doing with them. So we have to change this perception.

We've got to make sure that we're striving to achieve information, factual information, and understand the details. We've got to remove that emotional component out of this that we started with in the beginning. This should not be scary. This is an easy process to start adopting, we just need to do it.

We then need to influence design. We need to make things. We need to plan for the life cycle. Not just what is this part going to do? What is its function? What is it going to do and how are we going to reclaim it at the end of life?