Autodesk Fusion’s Manufacturing Sustainability Insights (MSI) tool offers companies three ways to rapidly calculate—and minimize—the carbon footprint of products. 

Leaders in the design and manufacturing space know they need to take steps to curb the carbon impact of their processes and products. But too often, companies lack any way to accurately report on sustainability metrics until their products are rolling off the production line—far too late to make meaningful changes.  

This challenge leaves sustainability teams frustrated, as they’re brought in only after critical design decisions have already been made. And it puts companies at a potential disadvantage in a marketplace where government regulations and consumer preferences are increasingly tilting in favor of more sustainable products.  

Autodesk Fusion’s Manufacturing Sustainability Insights (MSI) feature, launched last spring, gives engineers the ability to instantly see the carbon impacts of their design decisions. Users can toggle between different inputs and receive real-time estimates of how these changes will affect their “cradle-to-gate” carbon outputs.  

Internally, we used the MSI feature to cut the emissions associated with a keypad that Autodesk University attendees could build and take home during our AU Factory Experience event. Simply by making some small changes to the product design, we were able to cut the carbon footprint of this product by nearly 50 percent. When companies leverage MSI to also tweak three key factors—materials selection, manufacturing processes, and production geography—they could see even more dramatic results. 

The MSI tool for Autodesk Fusion enables teams to:

1. Explore the most sustainable materials

 
It’s obvious that choosing materials with a smaller carbon footprint will improve the overall sustainability of a product design. However, it remains quite difficult for organizations to obtain information about the environmental impact of the raw materials they use.  If designers want to know how much carbon is associated with each potential production material, they often have to research this information themselves. Because this would slow down the product design process, this research often never gets done, and companies miss out on simple steps that could make their products more sustainable.  

Fusion’s MSI tool bridges this gap by providing designers with readily accessible carbon information for a range of common alloys and polymers via a drop-down menu. As soon as designers select a material, they will instantly see how that choice affects the overall carbon footprint of the product.  

Autodesk partnered with Gravity Climate, an end-to-end carbon and energy management platform built for complex operations and supply chains, to offer this data in an easily accessible, free-to-use feature.  

2. Choose the most sustainable manufacturing process

The discussion around sustainable design and manufacturing tends to revolve almost exclusively around materials selection, with maybe a nod here and there to shipping. But we’ve actually found that by simply changing the way a product is made—even with the same materials, in the same location—can make a dramatic difference to overall carbon emissions.  

MSI analyzes common manufacturing processes including CNC machining, 3D printing, and injection molding, among others.  

Generally, additive processes are less carbon-intensive than subtractive processes, because they tend to produce less waste. Some of this is common sense, but it’s worth noting that additive and subtractive processes actually have inverse causes of carbon emissions. Additive processes, being very material-efficient, see most of their emissions coming from energy consumption, whereas a process like CNC milling sees most of its emissions coming from the embodied carbon of stock material.  

It’s also important to consider scale. A process that requires a mold might be more carbon-intensive at first, but eventually manufacturers will reach a break-even point where the per-unit carbon output of the molding process is lower than that of other processes.  

Previously, design and sustainability teams would have had to pore over complex research papers and build their own lifecycle assessment workflows using Excel spreadsheets to arrive at these conclusions. But MSI puts this granular information at designers’ fingertips, allowing them to instantly factor projected production runs into their carbon calculations.   

3. Consider the carbon impact of geography

It’s true that shipping distances can affect the embodied carbon of manufactured products. But for small, light items, the difference is sometimes negligible. Frequently, the more important consideration is the energy grid mix of different manufacturing markets. Simply relocating manufacturing from a region dependent on fossil fuels to one powered predominantly by clean energy can lead to a threefold reduction in carbon emissions.  

These calculations become even more interesting—and more impactful—when you consider multiple factors alongside one another. For instance, say you’re considering making a product using a very energy-intensive process like selective laser sintering. In a country where the energy supply is renewable, this might not actually increase the total carbon associated with a product by all that much. (In fact, if the process allows you to use more sustainable materials, it could even potentially help you to cut carbon.) However, in many markets, the decision to use this process would spike carbon numbers dramatically.  

MSI allows designers to not only see how geography affects carbon, but also how different countries perform with different sets of materials and manufacturing processes—giving companies the data they need to make informed decisions about where to produce their goods.  

Looking ahead

While MSI provides valuable insights, it’s not a replacement for a full environmental audit, which would require the expertise of an environmental engineer. But it does represent a crucial first step in helping manufacturers to better understand—and minimize—their carbon impact. Also, the tool is designed to evolve based on user feedback, with plans to expand MSI’s materials library and capabilities over time. Looking ahead, it’s easy to imagine a future in which MSI is able to track and calculate carbon data accurately enough to produce environmental product declarations—an outcome that would be extraordinarily useful as global environmental regulations continue to tighten in the coming years.   

For now, think of MSI as a foundational tool to help companies first measure—and then minimize—the carbon associated with the products they are designing. For many companies, MSI Insights will sit alongside other Sustainability tools offer by Autodesk that enable them to comply with regulatory standards and reduce waste. Learn more about those tools here. 

Sustainable product design doesn’t happen by accident. Rather, it’s the result of countless deliberate choices. By providing real-time data about materials, manufacturing processes, and production geography, MSI accelerates and simplifies the process of making these decisions, paving the path for a new era of sustainable manufacturing.