Tools of the trade, Part 6

Last Comments on Software

In the last posting I posed the question "suppose you want to take some action - either at the design end or the manufacturing end. What tools can you rely on after you've done the background work and now want to move on to execution?"

The simple answer I gave was "This is where software tools come in."

I then proceeded to go into details about some interesting software tools that aid the designer, or manufacturer, in decision making about green and sustainable actions to take.

Shortly after that posting, I was invited to participate in a live (and simultaneously web-broadcast) Sustainability Summit at Autodesk in San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, the event was well organized and attended by an interesting mix of media, industry and students (including a sizable audience "attending" via a YouTube live link). It was interesting to hear a large corporation with a number of software tools for designers and engineers in this field, like the Autodesk® Inventor® 3D CAD software, discuss where they think the market is going and what software tools will have to allow the designer, and manufacturer, to do.

The program was comprised of a series of discussions and panel discussion starting with company CEO Carl Bass in conversation with Marc Gunther, a Fortune and GreenBiz contributor, discussing the importance of sustainability in the future of design.  Although this conversation was design centric, it had a lot of leads into green and sustainable manufacturing.

Other participants included Clean Tech Partner Burt Hamner of Hydrovolts; myself representing our lab at UC Berkeley on green manufacturing; Daniel Talancon and Vince Romanin, UC Berkeley graduate students on their Eco-Fridge design using Inventor; and Ken Sanders of Gensler on their Shanghai Tower design and other sustainable building projects.

Rather than rattling on about the meeting here, I've decided to take the easy way out and post links to the recorded YouTube presentations and discussions. That is more effective and, to me, better to hear the participants speaking about their views in their own words.

As a set up to the recording of my comments as part of the panel discussion lead by Autodesk's Sarah Krasley, I was asked to describe our "spatial vs temporal" matrix of manufacturing activities. This was first presented in the January 21, 2010 posting as part of a "low hanging fruit" series.

As a quick refresher, in case you did not see this (or since it was over two years ago!), the matrix is designed to illustrate different levels of control and flexibility in manufacturing from a temporal view (ie what comes first, second, third, and so on) and spatial view (where in the enterprise - broadly viewed - can actions be taken). I had detailed the temporal configuration as including four levels, from product design at level 1 through process design and planning (manufacturing plan) to parameter selection and process optimization to post manufacturing operations (finishing, etc.) at level 4. It was noted that the flexibility to make decisions decreases as we move away from design towards manufacturing.

This makes sense. On the factory floor we are no longer able to change the product or component design, material or other features. We may not, at level 3, be able to do much about the suite of machines we intend to use to produce the part. We most likely can adjust some of the operating parameters or, at level 4, do some finishing or alteration to overcome a problem.

The spatial domains are defined along the same lines except they will move outward from production specifics in the plant to facility design, enterprise design, logistics (or inter-enterprise) and supply chain and distribution.

The figure below was included as a graphical representation of the matrix and is worth repeating here.

The temporal axis is horizontal and the spatial axis is vertical. As one moves up and to the right in the figure one can suffer a loss of decision making capability as all earlier decisions in the product design cycle, or lower in the supply chain, effect the ability to make decisions at higher levels.  How you affect what is happening at any location within this matrix depends on what information you have about the process or system represented there, what your understanding is of what this information says about what's going on, what ability you have respond to this understanding, if needed (or leave it alone if it is performing correctly), what "levers and buttons" you have at your disposal to make a response and, finally, what means you have to determine if your response had any impact and, if so, how much.

That is, with respect to our tools discussion here, how well the software you are using to integrate across these different levels includes all the critical information, reasoning, behavioral models, visualization, etc. to support your work and decisionmaking.

So, with that set up on the summit in general and the background on my particular contribution, the links to the different presentations are listed below. They are only 3-5 minutes in length so are easily digestible (with the exception of the interview with the CEO - which is much longer.)

Warning - this was a a commercial event so it is, not surprisingly, very professionally done and has a commercial message. But, the contributors are genuine in their enthusiasm are their messages are on target and worth listening to!

The links are:

- Overview of the program and Sara Krasley interviewing the panel

- UC Berkeley students on their Eco-fridge design

- Ken Sanders of Gensler speaking about green building design

- Dave Dornfeld speaking about the temporal - spatial matrix discussed above

- Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO, being interviewed (Careful- this is a long one! 34 Minutes)

Or you can see the complete "playlist" on line.

Enjoy!!

For sure, there is other software on the market that addresses many of these same issues. You should check that out on your own.

Finally, next time we'll revisit the leveraging discussion.

Tools of the trade, Part 5

Software to the rescue

In part 4 of this series (Back in December … it has been a busy start to the year!) I introduced the idea of the "design to production pipeline."  This was to illustrate the design to manufacturing continuum and show a strategy whereby the designer, looking into the pipeline from the design perspective, could see the follow-on steps and requirements for successful production. Although the process is rarely actually serial, it is clear that some things come first, like design, and others come later, like actual production. These days there is (or should be) a lot of iteration between the determination of the final design specs and the establishment of the process plan for manufacturing.

The point is, there needs to be an inclusion of green or sustainable requirements in the specifications of the design (like material selection, for example) and on to the manufacturing stage (like insuring efficient conversion of materials in to the product).

We have been discussing the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Sustainable Manufacturing Toolkit. In case you've missed the past three posting you can find details on the toolkit in an line Start-up Guide. This toolkit is well suited for organizing your strategy. But, what if you want to design or manufacture something and take green and sustainable principles into account?

Suppose you want to take some action - either at the design end or the manufacturing end. What tools can you rely on after you've done the background work and now want to move on to execution. This is where software tools come in.

As usual, it is not simple.

If you are a designer, and are beyond the function expansion stage and into more elements of the detail design, you are invariably led to consider some of the commercial software that is on the market for including sustainable (or at least green) constraints in the design.

As a green or sustainable manufacturer you usually have three basic "levers" you can adjust to optimize the production of a product or component - process technology, energy source and material. That is, you can improve the efficiency of the process in terms of energy or material consumption, you can reduce the embedded energy in the materials or use cleaner sources of energy, or you can introduce processing technology (remember the wedges?!) that are better suited to converting materials into product.

Let me state, at the outset, that I am not selling any particular piece of software! But, I am aware of some interesting developments in software that can get the designer (or manufacturer) moving in the right direction. And these offer insight (view down the pipe!) during the design process. This can be the design of a product or component, design of a machine used in production, or design of a factory.

First is material selection. Some time back we had a series of postings on "less is more" (see for example one on "how much less is less?"). In that series I mentioned software from Granta Design and their CES and  "Ecoselector" software. This particular software allows the designer (or manufacturing engineer) to consider energy (embedded and processing) and recycling potential along with other material properties in the course of designing a product or component.

The Eco Audit Tool is specially designed for this. It is an add on to Granta's basic material selector software that assists in meeting environmental objectives in engineering and design - objectives such as limiting the carbon footprint of a product, reduce the product's energy usage, limit wastes and emissions, or specify the details of its disposal at end of life.

First, Granta is clear about the components of the life cycle. In the figure below from the website linked above we can see the the different life stages of a product from material production through manufacture, use and end of life as well as the items tracked (energy, feedstocks and transport) and the environmental stressors. Stressors are the outputs of the cycle that impact the environment - e.g. greenhouse gases, particulates and waste.

Granta software makes an early analysis about where in the life cycle the major impact is seen (recall our discussion of use vs manufacturing phase impacts?). In the figure below, also from Granta, an example showing a product for which the use phase dominates in terms of energy consumption.

Then, in the lower boxes in the figure, different strategies are listed to minimize energy consumption. For the use phase these include minimizing weight, heat loss, electrical loss and systems losses. One can imagine this applied to an automobile where high strength to weight materials will offer enhanced fuel economy or, as a system, the powertrain is designed to reduce losses in power transmission. One can also envision this in the design of a machine tool for production for which the ability to idle machine components when not in productive use can save energy.

Interestingly, Granta has a link to Autodesk Inventor software. Or, perhaps better said, Autodesk Inventor has a link to Granta! This is shown on a clever (if not a bit commercial) Youtube video on how the CES software works and how they link into Autodesk for materials in sustainable design.

The Autodesk® Inventor® 3D CAD software, according to Autodesk's website info "offer[s] a comprehensive, flexible set of software for 3D mechanical design, product simulation, tooling creation, and design communication."

More on Autodesk and the Inventor software next time along with other commercial products that address this (like Solidworks design tools) and lifecycle assessment software for a deep dive in the impacts of the product or process.

Green Pot? Not!

Choice Items for the New Year

I've hit the pause button on the "Tools of the Trade" postings for the moment and, on the occasion of New Year, have included here a few items that seem a propos to green manufacturing - broadly interpreted- under the headlines 'green or not'? I know it sounds a bit like a Dr. Seuss book title - but read on!

The first one is thanks to Ralph Resnick and Corey Kovalcik of NCDMM.  It is a reference to a posting in the New York Times on the carbon footprint and environmental footprint of pot growing! I think they assumed that since I am at Berkeley with all those free thinkers that I had something to do with this.

I was a "child of the 60's" but was not a pot person (not even smoked but "didn't inhale" like our esteemed former President Bill Clinton!) As I explained to my dad many years ago when I joined the Berkeley faculty, every thing at Berkeley does not smell of burning hemp or involve overthrowing "the man."

You can find the full story on this at the NYT link. I don't know Dr. Evan Mills from Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the author of the study quoted in the article, but he seems like a serious researcher to me. The report is enlightening and will pose a dilemma for many folks (theoretical as well as practical - maybe even Ron Paul supporters!). His full report can be accessed on-line.

The last such dilemma I faced was not paper or plastic bags but natural versus artificial trees! This was first reported (or my first observation) in a Science 2.0 posting in December 2007 titled "The great debate: Real vs artificial Christmas trees." The article states "While chopping down a living tree may see like the most un-environment friendly thing you can do, in this situation it actually appears to be the “greener” choice. Because it’s not so much about how many uses you can get from your tree … as it is about what the tree is made of, and what it does to the environment when it is created and when you dispose of it."

"Artificial trees are manufactured using a polyvinyl chloride (or PVC), which is a petroleum-derived plastic. The raw material for fake Christmas trees is both non-renewable and polluting. Furthermore, PVC production results in the unhealthy emission of a number of carcinogens, such as dioxin, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride."

"Additionally, in order to make the PVC needles on artificial trees more malleable, the manufacturers use lead and other additives that have been linked to liver, kidney, neurological, and reproductive system damage in lab studies on animals. The Children’s Health Environmental Coalition warns fake trees "may shed lead-laced dust, which may cover branches or shower gifts and the floor below the tree.""

Wow. Check out that article … the comments are rich and numerous too.

USA Today weighed in on this last December, 2011 in an article that focuses on the dispute between manufacturers of artificial trees and the National Christmas Tree Association. Not surprisingly each side sees the other as spreading misleading info. Up to you to decide if you have a need for a tree next year!

But, back to the pot.

The article starts out with the statement "indoor marijuana cultivation consumes enough electricity to power 2 million average-sized U.S. homes, which corresponds to about 1 percent of national power consumption." A lot of production is indoors these days using high intensity lights - resulting in an approximate $5 billion dollar annual electricity bill. According to Mills that contributes the equivalent in green house gas emissions to about 3 million cars on the road.

It gets worse. The smoke from consuming all that marijuana further complicates the issue. Report author Mills said a single marijuana cigarette represents 2 pounds of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours.

Don't try going "off grid" to raise your pot and expect to save the planet either. Mills stated "for off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators."

And then there is all the water! Each marijuana plant needs between 3 and 5 gallons of water per day to grow to "harvest".

Dr. Mills' report is comprehensive and contains detailed graphics and tables of impact.  Table 4 is specially intriguing. Did you know that "one Cannabis cigarette is like driving 15 miles in a 44mpg car emitting about 2 pounds of CO2?" Which is where the equivalent to operating a 100- watt light bulb for 17 hours comes from.

It also includes suggestions as to how you can improve the energy efficiency of cannabis cultivation. I will not be using this as a case study in my graduate Sustainable Engineering course this semester but it is an exceptionally well done, and complete, study.

Finally, Neil Duffie (a friend and professor in Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison) reminded me of this poem on the "one hoss shay" following a presentation I gave in Madison late last year on sustainable manufacturing and design for sustainability.

This is a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes about a deacon who, apparently concerned about designing things with some components that wear out or fail faster than others (hence "wasting the over designed components and the material and effort that went into them), designed a one horse shay of components and materials that lasted exactly 100 days and then totally disintegrated all at once.  For your information, a shay is a light, covered, two-wheeled carriage for two persons, drawn by a single horse - thanks Wikipedia!

I believe the horse was fine however!

The poem starts with the following lines:

"Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,

That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it - ah, but stay,
..."

And ends many lines later with:

"How it went to pieces all at once, 

All at once, and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.


End of the wonderful one-hoss shay, 

Logic is logic. That's all I say."

You can find the whole story (or poem) on-line (and I know that other links can be found by searching.)

No mention of the carbon footprint of the shay unfortunately.

Oh, one more item! Karen Tworsey brought to my attention a recent posting on her site on the
"10 Wackiest Ideas Ever for Improving the Environment."Everyone has their own definition of "wacky" but, for me, the human powered floating gym is enough. And there is one with kangeroos but modesty prevents me from any more details on that one!

Best wishes for a prosperous and happy New Year!

Tools of the trade, Part 4

Building the green manufacturing pipeline

It has been a busy month of December so I am a bit behind in this posting. The good news is some of my activities helped me to frame this and the next few discussions!

In a post on October 14, 2009 I discussed the concept of "ubiquitously green" as we were getting into the green manufacturing subject in greater detail. I cited Miriam Webster (aka "the dictionary") for a definition of ubiquitous as "existing or being everywhere at the same time;  constantly encountered; widespread" and they give the example "a ubiquitous fashion." The adverb ubiquitously means, essentially, in a ubiquitous manner. Another term that could be used here is holistic - meaning incorporating all aspects.

The topic then was expanded to a discussion of the terms "design for manufacturing" (or DfM) and "manufacturing for design" (MfD). These terms are commonly used in the semiconductor industry where manufacturing restrictions often limit the capability of designers in chip design. The concept is that, from the perspective of the designer, she should be able to look down the product development and manufacturing pipeline and anticipate problems and challenges to manufacture the design or some particular feature. It's the reverse for the MfD side. The manufacturing engineer should be able to look up the pipeline and see design features and elements that are going to cause challenges. Or, ideally, see the requirements of design in advance so that the capable manufacturing processes or systems can be in place when the design rattles down the pipe to production.

This view works well with a temporal representation of the design to manufacturing to distribution to use and end of life treatment scenario. And, hence, the requirement is that throughout all the stages from extraction of materials through the process of their conversion, to manufacture and assembly of the product, its distribution and delivery, use and eventual  reuse, remanufacture or recycling, the principles of green and sustainable manufacturing should be "everywhere at the same time; constantly encountered."

I like this view. It creates a clear mental image of the various actors, almost in relay race style, handing off their piece of the process to the next person in the pipeline with the coordination and competence typical of a relay team competing in a race.

Tools to help with the design to production pipeline. I've used the image shown below to delineate the critical elements in the pipeline from a production process development and implementation view (remember I am a manufacturing engineer and the blog is titled "green manufacturing"!).

This view starts with a functional model of a process for creating the features of the part or workpiece and then continues through the prototype building (or at least solid conceptualization from the process model output) through integration with the computer aided design (or CAD) capability to insure that process scale-up can be achieved and then the details of production line layout (design and optimization), supply chains with the requisite quality gates and, finally, but not necessarily lastly, the integration of the environmental impacts, social effects, energy, material utilization, etc. for green manufacturing.

What makes this so "connected" so that the person on the process model end of the pipe (and with the specification of the part from the design team in hand) can see down the entire length of the pipeline and envision the opportunities and problems to be taken or avoided (respectively) while doing his or her part?

Simple answer - data. Data on the design; data on the materials available and their usage; data on the impacts of the process steps; data on efficiency of the factory layout; data on the distribution network and supply chain; data on the consumer usage and re-use potential; data on the recovery of materials from the product at end of life; and so on and so on.

The tools we are referring to should allow this "temporal" representation, or time dependent sequence of stages, to be compressed into the frame of view of whomever is working along the pipeline. That is, we should need no longer wait for action and reaction, then assessment and correction and repeat the process.

That's the kind of tools I am referring to. Pipeline at the speed of light - or data transfer and representation in real time.

Then we need to step back from manufacturing. What comes before? Should this be linked in to the pipeline? Meaning, should we "add some pipe" to the front of the manufacturing image illustrated above?

You bet we should!

Here is a representation of the "design to manufacturing" steps I've used before. It starts a long time before a designer starts inputting data to the CAD system. In an idealized process, we speak to the

customers to understand what they want, need. We write design specifications. We do a conceptual and then detailed design. We then hand this off to manufacturing. Actually, today, there is a lot more feedback between all these steps and, again, not as sequential as we might think.

But, the important idea is that this product creation "pipeline" is on the front of the manufacturing pipeline shown earlier.

Same story. Same need for data instantaneously available at all stages of the pipe. Same ability to see what the effect of one's impact is "downstream" in the pipeline. But, it is not a real impact if we do this right - only a potential impact. An impact we can amplify or attenuate depending on what we are trying to achieve.

Next time we'll look at some of the tools already available to enable big chunks of this pipeline and the kind and sources of data to drive this.

Tools of the trade, Part 3

Maps and directions

We continue our discussion of the the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Sustainable Manufacturing Toolkit and related items. In case you've missed the past two posting you can find details on the toolkit in and on line Start-up Guide.

Last time we looked at the seven defined steps from priority setting to performance indicators and normalization factors - factors that relate the level of performance to the individual product (piece, weight, volume) or to sales volume, etc. These factors could be based on production quantities in number, sales volume, hours worked, levels of service provided ("over one billion hamburgers served"!) or product lifetime.

The tool kit also discusses how to prioritize areas of improvement that can be focused on. One can use a degree of impact to assist with prioritization. For example, improving air quality may result in a significant environmental impact as well as business related impacts.  "High" impact for the environment is defined as resulting in "significant damage or enhancement to the general environment" and likely to be "of great concern to stakeholders." This level of impact for the business side of the equation is defined a having "significant ramifications for business and reputation with potential for substantial losses or gains."

Medium impact is a lesser - moderate - view of above and low impact is minimal damage or enhancement of environment and ramifications for business and reputation.

One interesting visualization approach suggested is the "priority matrix" for showing, graphically, the positive or negative impacts in terms of key performance indicators. The matrix shows the relative impact in terms of both environmental and business effects/results. On the environmental impact axis contributors include: energy efficiency, air and water quality, use of toxic materials, use of renewable materials, greenhouse gas emissions and product impact. On the business axis contributors include: sales, cost, licence to operate, disruptions to operation and reputation/brand.

The illustration below, from OECD, shows the bands of high priority issues (dark) to low priority issues (light) in this matrix with a data point for each impact or, I assume, interaction between business and environment.

The impacts with the highest potential for improvement/damage are the first priority.

This type of visualization has been proposed by others as well and can be a powerful illustrative tool for showing present circumstances (in terms of environmental or business conditions) as well as plotting changes.

An excellent example of this is the Siemens "Eco-care Matrix". The eco-care matrix has along the x-axis the business or customer benefit and along the y-axis the environmental benefit. A presentation by the head of Siemens Industry Solutions Division last year explained that the concept is to allow the assessment of the environmentally compatibility and cost effectiveness of anything from a single product to a complete industrial system or plant. The figure below, from Siemens, illustrates the concept.

The reference dot in the center describes the environmental performance and economical customer benefit of one or more green solutions compared to a defined reference solution (usually an existing product of system.) The environmental performance is measured using typical life cycle analysis (LCA) outputs and, for example, can use the results of a LCA tool such as GaBi.  The reference point, according to a published paper by Wegener (see reference below) is based on a system or product that "should deliver nearly the same function or service to the customer as the considered green solution. Only if both product systems under examination have the same function using of course different process technologies and product designs, their environmental impacts can be related to
the same functional unit."

The "new solution" is plotted on the matrix compared to the reference. Only if the trajectory improves both environmental and business benefits is the solution considered an overall improvement.

The economic benefit is determined using standard business accounting practices comparing the costs/benefits of the two alternatives.

For a detailed discussion of this approach, including an example and references, see the paper titled "Improving Energy Efficiency in Industrial Solutions - Walk the Talk" by Dieter Wegener et al from the Riso International Energy Conference in 2011.

A basic example is shown in a web posting from Siemens for a type of gearless AC motors used in dragline excavators — vehicles that pull a bucket freely suspended on a boom across earth or rocks in order to extract materials in large scale mining operations. The high efficiency of these motors makes the excavator 22 percent more environmentally compatible than the DC motor that serves as the reference, while reducing electricity costs by 22 percent.

Reading through the Siemens Eco-care Matrix methodology one can't help but notice strong similarities to the OECD toolkit approach. Concerns are on prioritization, normalization and the use of standardized metrics in the analysis to yield a realistic basis for decision making.

The OECD Toolkit also offers a number of case studies applying the methodology.

A logical process based on measurable impacts/performance related to realistic business outcomes and aided by a methodology for prioritization and progress tracking - all form a solid methodology for greening manufacturing.

Finally, I am participating in an Autodesk sponsored GreenBiz webinar on "Design Technology as a Sustainability Strategy for Manufacturers" on December 13th 2011 at 1PM EST. I will be joined in this webcast by Patrick Coulter, Chief Operating Officer, Granta Design, and Sarah Krasley, Product Manager, Sustainability, Autodesk. Joel Makower, Executive Editor at GreenBiz Group, will moderate the panel. You can find more info, and register for this free event, at the following GreenBiz link. Hope to "see" you there!

Tools of the trade, Part 2

Still turning!

In the last posting we began digging into the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Sustainable Manufacturing Toolkit. The toolkit can help companies the their business approach to be more viable, socially responsible and get the most out of greening opportunities and features a set of 18 key performance indicators (KPI) to measure and improve the environmental performance of manufacturing facilities.

You can find details on line: a Start-up Guide and a Web Portal with additional technical guidance, data tools and useful links.

The discussion in the toolkit elaborates on the relationships between manufacturing and the environment from the perspective of:

- inputs ( materials and things used in the product you make or in elements that go into the product you make),
- operations (process and systems that take the inputs and convert them into products, including facilities, transport of inputs and products, business travel, employee commuting, and other overhead), and
- products (including their use and end of life disposition)

But, the toolkit indicators mentioned above do not include the impact from commuting staff and logistics to transport inputs or products shown in the figure, but include the impact from business travel. This can be included in other ways.

The tool kit suggests "seven steps" to utilize the KPI's as illustrated in the circle image below from OECD. See the last posting for the list of KPI's.

The process starts with setting priorities and moves through measurement and improvement. Two significant steps are #2, select useful performance indicators (and determining what data needs to be collected), and step #3, measure the inputs used in production (this helps to identify how the materials and components used in production processes and systems influence environmental performance.)

Following this are the improvement steps.

An important part of the analysis is the selection of normalization factors - that is, relating the level of performance to the individual product (piece, weight, volume) or to sales volume, etc. The tool kit illustrates a number of different factors you can select to normalize the performance, including:

- Number, weight or units of products produced in the facility.
- Sales or value added in the facility.
- Person-hours worked in the facility.
- Units of function or level of services to be provided by the products produced in the facility.
- Lifetime of the products produced in the facility.

In our very early discussion of green metrics we introduced normalization factors, for example green house gas emission per capita, or area, or country. These are similar. You want to relate the impact to some measurable unit that makes sense in your business. Then determining where you are, and tracking where you have been or are going, is much easier.

The tool kit also discusses how to prioritize areas of improvement to focus on. It suggests a matrix showing the relative impact in terms of both environmental and business effects/results. This has been proposed by others as well and can be a powerful illustrative tool for plotting changes.

We'll go on to that in the next posting.

Finally, my lab has been looking into social metrics of sustainability and how they intersect engineering and manufacturing decision making and activities. There will be more to come on this for sure. But, in the meantime, one of the researchers found an interesting web-based  survey from the Fair Trade Fund, Inc. to estimate your "slavery footprint."

Starting from the question "how many slaves work for you?" (!) it guides you through a set of questions starting with your gender through your living standard, eating habits (including exceptional interest in what kind of nuts you eat), jewels you own, electronics you have, sports you play (and at each stage mentioning the conditions some folks in various parts of the world work in to provide these - for example, did you know that "In China, soccer ball manufacturers will work up to 21 hours in a day, for a month straight" - according to the survey?), and, of course, your closet (and reminding me that "1.4 million children have been forced to work in Uzbek cotton fields. There are fewer children in the entire New York City public school system"!).

At the end it tells you "how many slaves [are] working for [me]" based on their data and on my consumption patterns and, then, the typical supply chains and sources for these goods and materials.

I have no idea how accurate this website is and I do not endorse its data base or determinations. But, it is very illuminating, and sobering if at least true to some extent. It told me I have 48 slaves working for me. (It looks like my closet is the culprit!) Even if it is off by 50% that is still 24 slaves - nothing I am comfortable with.

Try it - it is sobering. And if you are a manufacturer with supply chains or materials sources from some of the suspect regions this can be a cause of concern and risk.

One last thing - LMAS has set up a Twitter page! You can follow the comments and observations of the researchers in LMAS with the "OTHER LINKS ON GREEN MANUFACTURING" on this page on the right. I will add my comments from time to time as well. We promise not to overwhelm you with our "insights"!

Tools of the trade, Part 1

Turning the supertanker

As any good engineer knows (and carpenter, surgeon, chef, etc. I imagine) you are only as effective at your task as the tools you have. And your own skill of course.

Over the past two years we have discussed various approaches to greening manufacturing, the metrics you need to use, the tools that can help act on the results of the metric data and some examples.

I attended the first annual CaFFEETForum last week in San Francisco. CaFFEET is an acronym for California France Forum on Energy Efficiency Technologies and the focus of the meeting was achieving low-CO2 industrial plants. Sponsors included the French electricity utility, EDF and our local utility, PG&E along with several organizations including EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute). The discussion centered in energy (meaning not much attention to the other green elements like water, materials and other resource use.)

One of the speakers from EDF reviewed two major barriers to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in industry:

- the approaches considered to achieve decreases too often focus only on energy efficiency without considering the attractiveness of the business model for the approach (that is, great idea but economically infeasible), and
- industry in general and facilities in specific don't always have the in-house expertise/competence to manage projects of this size/scope

He was speaking generally of large scale projects such as replacing boilers or heat recovery systems and not just turning off lights in warehouses.

The speaker elaborated a strategy to overcome those barriers and assist industry at the plant level to decrease emissions based on three principles:

One - Levers: take advantage/utilize one or more of these 7 levers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

1) energy efficiency,
2) on-site renewable energy,
3) fuel switching,
4) energy storage,
5) demand response,
6) carbon offsets, and
7) green electricity purchase.

Most of these are well known in name or have been discussed in earlier blog postings here. Demand response is a bit more complicated (and there was a long discussion about "smart grid" at the meeting and what that means for industry) and we'll spend some time in a future posting going over smart grid and demand  response technology and likely impacts in manufacturing.

I think there could be another lever - recovering energy from the process - but, when questioned,  the speaker thought that was part of the first lever.

These seven levers, applied individually or combined would allow engineers/manager to identify and assess several possible technical approaches and, more importantly, associated business models. A fascinating part of the discussion was what are acceptable returns on investment to "make the business model work."

Two - Think big -  a holistic analysis of the plant identifying the combination of levers that maximizes the emission reduction per invested dollar is required. This will insure that a profitable business models for the stakeholders is in place. This holistic analysis should consider the entire set of factors involved, for example, the types of industrial processes, local weather conditions, the carbon content of the electricity from your supplier/grid (recall the conversion of kWh to GHG and its dependency on the source of the electricity - nuclear to coal to hydro), and any expected evolutions of the plant and the various costs (get out your crystal ball!), and

Three - Get expertise -  it may be advantageous to set up a partnership with an organization that has experience employing the seven levers in your industry to ensure that the analysis and eventual recommendations are objective.

Did I mention that there were a number of consulting organizations involved with the forum? This last one is for them!

But, sarcasm aside, this is a very logical approach.

To insure that any of the efforts from applying these levers, or any other levers you might use, are effective, it is helpful to have tools to measure the present state of your environmental performance (energy use, greenhouse gas, materials, wastes, water, etc.).

That's where the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Sustainable Manufacturing Toolkit comes in. As reported in the last blog, the toolkit can help companies with their business approach to insure it can be more viable, socially responsible and get the most out of greening opportunities. One feature is that outlines a set of 18 key performance indicators (KPI) to measure and improve the environmental performance of manufacturing facilities.

In case you missed reading the last posting, you can find a Start-up Guide providing a step-by-step approach to measuring and benchmarking environmental performance, and a Web Portal with additional technical guidance, data tools and useful links.

So, what does the toolkit do?

First of all, it defines sustainable manufacturing as, basically, as progression of green steps. I understand that sustainability is the destination and not the journey. I have consistently defined green manufacturing as the steps along the path towards sustainability, see the posting on technology wedges. Green manufacturing technology wedges help to "turn the supertanker!"

Others are more severe in their definitions!

Graedel and Howard-Grenville explained the nature of sustainability in their book "Greening the Industrial Facility" (Springer, 2005, p.126). They bluntly stated:

 "A crucial important property of sustainability is that the concept is an absolute, as are pregnant and unique, to use two common examples. A sustainable world is not one that is slightly more environmentally responsible than it was yesterday.”

I tend to prefer this absolute definition and have used that in earlier blogs. Others take a more nuanced view but, I expect, do understand the full impact of sustainable manufacturing is achieved over some time with many small steps.

So, what about the OECD. They cite the US Department of Commerce's definition (“The creation of manufactured products that use processes that minimize negative environmental impacts, conserve energy and natural resources, are safe for employees, communities, and consumers and are economically sound” from US Department of Commerce (2011), Sustainable Manufacturing Initiative website.

They elaborate that sustainable manufacturing is "all about minimising the diverse business risks inherent in any manufacturing operation while maximising the new opportunities that arise from improving your processes and products."

The guide helps engineers and business folks improve the environmental performance of their facilities, systems and processes.

The guide also gives helpful background on motivations for sustainable/green manufacturing - very similar to those used when I started this blog and we asked "why green manufacturing."

Importantly, the OECD guide introduces a set of sustainable manufacturing indicators and talks about how those can be normalized to the output or performance of your factory, system or process. This is a key step.

These are shown below categorized by Inputs, Operations and Products, from the Toolkit.

This is a good set of indicators and the toolkit indicates that indicators such as water intensity, energy intensity and green house gas intensity can be extended to measure supply chain related impacts.

An important "next step" is the selection of normalization factors - that is, relating the level of performance to the individual product (piece, weight, volume) or to sales volume, person-hours worked, etc.

We'll go on to that in the next posting and explain more of the OECD Toolkit procedure and application in the next part of this discussion.