Green consumer survey

The percentage of US customers who do not care about the environment (‘Basic Browns’) has risen from 28% in 1990 to 37% in 1996, according to the Green Gauge Report conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide, US. The percentage of ‘Greenback Greens’, who are willing to pay 20% more for environmentally sound products has declined from 11% to 5%. Environmental factors are not as important as product issues such as quality, price, brand and convenience of purchase, etc. However, the US government is increasingly purchasing in an environmentally sound manner, incorporating ‘green’ criteria in procurement. Finally, nearly 75% of Americans think that they should take more positive action towards the environment (the ‘guilt gap’) with recycling the only green activity that has increased.

Sources: The Hartman report, the Hartman Group, Bellevue, WA; American Demographics

Buying recycled

In a new book by Joel Makower, ‘10 Easy ways to buy recycled’ there are various examples of products made out of waste or recycled materials. Makower states that ‘If you’re not buying recycled products, you’re not really recycling’. Examples include a doll made out of recycled soda bottles and organic cotton; key chains, clipboards and magnets made out of used computer circuit boards; wallets, backpacks and book covers out of recycled plastic bottle fibres and coffee tables from bicycle inner tubes, chains and gears. Joel Makower is the author of ‘The Green Consumer’ and editor of the ‘Green Business Letter’.

Source: Earth Action Network, 1997, http://www.emagazine.com:80/0997gl_ consumer.html

Green glass

The German company Seiler’s patented ‘high temperature vitrification technique’ – a process which makes ceramic glass products out of steel mill dust, garnet blast media residue and industrial wastewater treatment sludge was accepted by the California Environmental Agency as a recycling technique. Since the process is no longer considered a waste treatment process, Seiler can start marketing the products for abrasives, roofing tile granules and architectural materials.

Source: Business Wire news

New O2 contacts

O2 liaison Officers were appointed recently in the Philippines, Mexico and India and will now inform designers in their country about O2. Liaison Officers have already been appointed in Japan, Germany and USA.

The Netherlands Design Institute to coorperate with O2

The Netherlands Design Institute (NDI) will cooperate with the O2 Global Network and other organizations interested in creating the O2 Website. Any suggestions, comments and contributions are welcome. In 1998, O2 will have its tenth anniversary and O2 Netherlands its fifth.

O2 Japan was launched in 1992 with an O2 exhibition in Seibu. This was followed by the Tennen (‘Nature’) Design conference in 1995.

‘Tennen Design’ ecological design conference

Tennen Design, the Japanese ecological design conference, highlighted that the Western problem solving approach was insufficient for developing eco-design solutions if not balanced with an approach that recognises ‘values’. Eco-designers try to find fixes for product-related environmental problems, but in most cases this is an incremental approach allowing for budget,time and constraints. A theme that arose was ‘are we producing sustainable solutions or are we just going nowhere fast’: doing good things, but possibly in the wrong direction? A suggestion from the conference was that it is equally important to consider the ‘values’ that we strive for. It is important to consider the ‘value’ that the product will attain for the customer in 15 or 30 years time and how this relates to environment. Then the designer should consider how this should and will influence his/her design now and in the future.

The Tennen Design conference was held in the shintoist Honen In temple in Kyoto, the temple city of Japan. Workshops had themes like ‘Design that will last 100 years’, ‘Ecological machines’ and ‘Information environment and design’.

Monks read email

A parallel conference was connected by email to Delft in the Netherlands. The concept was to provide a comparative Western perspective on the ideas that developed at Tennen Design. Monks from the Honen In temple and participants translated the printouts of the East-West conversation for each other.

A green laptop

Some of the inevitable misunderstandings from the e-mail workshop actually led to new ideas. For example, the question of whether a laptop computer could be made green or more sustainable evolved from the workshop entitled ‘from symbiotic to assimilated design’. This led to the concept of a vertical bath tub which the user enters. Gestures in the fluid are transmitted to the other people by movements in the fluid. The computer as an environment itself, in which you can swim.

Conclusion

As with any workshop, the concepts generated needed considerable prototyping. However, the aim of the conference was to act as a catalyst for new thinking. As Misako Yomosa, one of the organisers, puts it: ‘I think of the conference as an initiation of continuing activities toward ecooriented society’.

The Tennen Design Forum continues its work as a loose network.

More info: http://www.johokyoto.or.jp/~tennen/

The Japanese designer – interview with Fumi Masuda

Q: You have worked with European and US designers. Would you say the situation of the Japanese designers is similar?

A: Well, no. The position of industrial designers in Japan is unusual. Over 90% of the whole population of industrial designers in this country is employed by industry. Independent industrial designers are minorities. Major manufacturing industries such as Toyota Motor Co. or Matsushita Electric Co. have huge design centres and each of them employ 200 to 500 industrial designers in-house. They always work in collaboration with product planning, marketing and engineering groups and are usually specialists in particular product areas like computers, Office furniture and so on.

Q: Are they technically-oriented or aesthetically-oriented designers?

A: Industrial designers are generally recognized as having responsibilities in relation to the forms and images of the products.

Q: What about influencing product definition?

A: This is hard to say, as most work for big companies. Some of them are acting as design managers instead of being product design specialists.

Several designers work as consultants for comparably small local companies and may have more influence.

Q: Would you say Tennen Design had an average public?

A: Roughly speaking, half of the designers at Tennen Design Forum ‘95 were independent designers from Tokyo and the others were employed designers from the Kansai area (Kyoto and Osaka).

Q: So what else can we expect from Tennen Design?

A: Tennen Design is a temporary group or a non-regular event which has happened twice (the workshop in ’95 and an exhibition in ’96). The participants shared a very special time and space before going back to their own life. Someone may organize another Tennen Design sometime when he or she feels the awareness and attention is running out. No goal, no strategy.

Q: Is O2 a factor in Japan? It is European by origin and may still be rather European in approach.

A: I always respect the O2 way of thinking, which is very practical and realistic, in other words, quite Western. I hope we could show our way of thinking from the Eastern side. This is still difficult to explain to a Westerner. O2 is actually quite well known among young Japanese industrial designers. Quite a few of them would be interested in getting involved; the only barrier is the language problem.

Q: ‘What about the man on the street? Does he or she bother about environmental problems?’

A: Japanese people are generally aware of, or at least understand, the importance of the environmental issues. For many it is a deeply a cultural subject rather than a technical matter. They have a long history of living symbiotically with nature. But, I think they need some more time to remember how pleasant it used to be.

Recycling developments in Japan

If you don’t know how your products are going to be recycled, how can you ever design for it?

Background

In Japan, 24 million air conditioners, television sets, refrigerators and washing machines are bought annually. 14 million are thrown away per annum, which constitutes 620,000 tons of waste (over 1.2 % of household waste). To cope with the volume of household waste (50 million tons a year, 124 million inhabitants), a legal framework was set up in 1991. This will evolve into more specific and stricter laws over the years. Officially called ‘law for the promotion of using recycled resources’, the law is usually referred to as ‘the recycling law’. Therefore smart thinking implies that larger consumer products should be designed for recycling with consideration of ‘take back’ also included.

Pilot plant

Hitachi, together with two government agencies, set up a home appliance recycling pilot plant. To allow for effective separation of the materials, the connections, form enclosures and surface layers need to be released (‘unlocked’). To achieve this the pilot plant uses cryo

genics. Low temperatures (-150 degree C for steel) make the materials so brittle that they can be easily milled into small mono-material pieces. This is especially relevant for complex components like motors and compressors, where materials are closely intertwined. Even the paint comes off the steel. After the metals, the somewhat ‘warmer’ nitrogen can still be used for unlocking plastics.

Plastics

A new technique for plastics separation uses the temperature at which it becomes brittle. After cooling and milling, materials with can simply be separated by sieving. Only polyvinylchloride (PVC) is recycled, polyethylene (PE) is reduced to oil and polystyrene (PS) is burnt.

Bottom line

At the facility, recycling of refrigerators costs about ¥3500 (US$28), and recycling of televisions and washing machines about ¥1100 (US$9). With this capacity (3000 ton/year), Tokyo alone would need 7 plants. Therefore, Hitachi, MITI, Mitsubishi and Sony aim to build a plant with 4 times this capacity. •

Adapted from Technieuws, issue 1, 1997, Dutch Department of Economical Affairs.

SimaPro Details

PRé Consultants B.V. Plotterweg 12 3821 BB Amersfoort The Netherlands Tel +31 (0)33 4555022 Fax +31 (0)33 4555024 http//www.pre.nl This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Review of SimaPro 4.0

 f you have ever had cause to consider Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software, you will almost certainly have come across SimaPro. Since PRé Consultants released the very earliest version of SimaPro in 1990 it has led the field in terms of licence sales around the world. To date, the MS-DOS based SimaPro 3.1 (SP3.1) still manages twice the market share of its nearest rival. Now the next generation, SimaPro 4.0 (SP4.0), is due for release.

Unlike SP3.1, SimaPro 4.0 runs in the ubiquitous Windflows environment (Windflows 3.x, 95 and NT4) and whilst retaining everything which has made the earlier SimaPros successful, SP4.0 contains several new features, a revised and expanded database structure and an array of different ways to manipulate data and results.

Very simply, SimaPro will analyse the environmental impacts of a product, or compare the impacts of two or more products. It uses a modular system whereby you can combine individual processes (i.e.materials, transport, industrial processing and waste disposal options) from its central process database to make more complex ones. Processes are then placed in assembly boxes representing complete products. In this way, infinitely complex flflows of materials and processes (process trees) can be built up and these are stored in a life-cycle box which forms the top of the tree. The software can apply various weighting methods to calculate the resulting environmental impacts for the whole life-cycle arising from raw materials usage and substance emissions. These impacts are worked out for any number of criteria such as ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, summer smog, etc, and the results are presented in a detailed tabular or graphic form.

A typical life-cycle box can contain several assemblies, details of the product’s use phase, i.e.its working life, and its final disposal options. Disposal options include disposal scenarios which allow you to direct waste units to final disposal, recycling, or re-use; disassembly boxes, which let you describe how a product might be broken up into its component parts for recycling or waste disposal; and re-use boxes which describe the processes involved in supplying a product for re-use.

Using the program – creating a process tree

As with a number of LCA programs, SimaPro 4.0 may appear a little overwhelming at first. However, the guided tour in the accompanying user manual is certainly comprehensive, and providing you take the time to follow it through from start to finish, you should become familiar with most of its features fairly quickly. The program is laid out in a logical manner, with separate tabbed pages for each of the important components and once you have learned the basics, SimaPro is remarkably straightforward and consistent, despite its complexity.

At the heart of the software is the information contained in the process records detailing materials, transport, industrial processes and waste disposal. Linking these processes together to form a process tree is done by inserting the name and amount of a ‘daughter process’ into the appropriate inputs from technosphere part of a parent process’ record, or into an assembly box. The operation is made very easy through the use of pop-up dialogue boxes containing processes for you to select, and at any time you can switch to a tree diagram showing the component parts of the current process or assembly you are constructing. Raw materials and emissions for each process record are selected from a separate substances database.

A very helpful feature is that the software lets you enter amounts in process records and assemblies using any scale you choose, as, for example, SimaPro is fully aware that 0.001 tons is really 1000 grams. This reduces the time taken to add data and probably increases data accuracy too! You can even define your own unit conversions in case you want SimaPro to calculate in units it does not initially recognise.

The structure of process records has been designed to conform to the relevant sections of the Society for the Promotion of Lifecycle Design (SPOLD) Common Format for Lifecycle Inventory (LCI) Data. The SPOLD format is likely to become the standard for LCA data and it makes good sense to include that standard in LCA software, making it much easier for organizations to share information. However, the SPOLD format is also somewhat unwieldy and asks that the user enters large amounts of text which contributes nothing to actual calculations. With this in mind, PRé have included the option to use, view, edit and add records in a much abridged form, using essential data only. Unfortunately, adopting an external data format has left no obvious place to include transport processes in the new style records. Transport must now be entered under energy/heat to conform with SPOLD, though it is categorised elsewhere in the software as a distinct process type, quite separate from energy.

SimaPro 4.0 is supplied with over 930 process records using data by Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; PRé Consultants, and an officially licensed and peer-reviewed version of the BUWAL 250, 1997 database.

You can add your own processes to the database, import them from other SimaPro users, and modify those supplied with the software to suite individual circumstances. SP3.1 users can convert their databases for use in SP4.0.

Using the program – calculating the impacts

Calculating impacts from a ‘process tree’ can be done at almost any time – the model certainly doesn’t need to be complete, though obviously the more complete your model, the more complete your results. Clicking the analyse button will set SimaPro calculating the inventory and the environmental impacts for a selected process.

Graphic display for characterisation stage of a product using the Eco-Indicator 95 evaluation method box. If you have more than one data object open, clicking the compare button will calculate the inventories and impacts for all of these so that the results can be viewed side by side.

SimaPro uses various evaluation methods which will classify substances according to their effects on environmental impacts such as acid rain and ozone depletion. PRé’s much used Eco-Indicator 95 (included in the software) will:

• Show the relative contributions of each calculated process to a list of environmental effects (scaled to 100%); • Normalise these contributions to the effects of an average European inhabitant over one year;

• Evaluate the effects by applying a weighting factor to derive the overall seriousness of the impacts with regard to human health and ecosystems;

• Aggregate all impacts in the evaluation stage to arrive at a single figure for the environmental impact of each material and process in the model.

SimaPro also comes with methods by CML (University of Leiden) and BUWAL’s ecopoint method. As with processes, you can create your own methods or edit those supplied. In this way you can include new substances in calculations, alter their overall effects, and add additional environmental criteria against which to measure the product’s impacts.

SimaPro will check to see if any substances in your model are missing from the selected evaluation method before it does any calculating. After that, the software will calculate all available data and present the user with some gloriously colorful graphs.

The graphical displays are easy to understand, but if you need to be specific, you can click the table button to view the precise impact results in tabular form. Either way, tables and graphs can be exported or pasted to other Windflows applications for further manipulation.

Clicking the substances page tab will take you to the inventory, or impact table. This lists the amounts of all substances included in the calculations under their respective materials or processes. There are separate tables for raw materials, airborne, waterborne and solid emissions, emissions to soil and non-material emissions such as heat and land use.

SimaPro can also display impact data on a process tree diagram. Here, each element details the name and amount of the process or box it represents and flows its contribution to environmental impacts by means of a numerical value and a vertical bar like a thermometer. The thermometers can display cumulative impacts for the whole tree, or absolute impacts for each element. They can represent any of the impact criteria available in the evaluation method used.

Conclusion

Whether you want to carry out a quick analysis or more detailed LCA calculations, SimaPro 4.0 is a useful aid. In the Windflows environment it is straightforward to use and has a logical and uniform feel about it. Process data now conforms to a common standard, rather than to the whims of an individual software producer. Data, results and graphs can be exported or pasted to other Windflows applications for presentation or further analysis.

The way it has been designed, SimaPro is perfectly capable of modelling a full range of products, from packaging to electronics, but the results will obviously depend upon the quality of data used. PRé are at pains to stress that the whole LCA methodology is constantly being updated and changed, and that you will not find a definitive answer with SimaPro. However, with the range and quality of data provided, and the flexibility to update and add your own, SimaPro offers a comprehensive tool for use in LCA calculations. •

Paul Stockdale is a freelance author and has a background in Wastes Management and Environmental Technology.

References

Siegenthaler, C.P., Linder, S. and Pagliari, F., ‘LCA Software Guide 1997’

( Adliswil, Switzerland: Swiss Association of Environmentally Conscious

Management, 1997).