Green Manufacturing

Green Pot? Not!

2012-01-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-27T22:41:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Consuming all but the oink!

2011-10-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Or, using most of what you have

When I was a graduate student in Madison in the early 70's I had a part time job working with a small company that delivered rock salt for domestic water softeners, sales in markets and stores and, on some occasions, to some major food processors in the area. One of those we'd deliver to was the Oscar Mayer Company.

There used to be a saying that Oscar Mayer used every part of the pig but the "oink" in making products (at least the pork based ones!). We also delivered to Frito-Lay but, other than getting some bags of chips that happened to "fall into our truck," we learned little about making potato chips.

I cannot confirm the exact details of material utilization at Oscar Mayer from my contact with them when a student, but it always struck with me as an ideal "buy to fly" ratio for food processing. I did observe truckloads of animal carcasses at the loading dock heading off to make gelatin and other products. Can't use much more of your raw materials than that.

On this subject, I was contacted a while back by some folks working in the furniture business on the East coast about maximizing yield in lumber processing for furniture. That sounded interesting to me.

One company, Manchester Wood, sent me some info about how they maximize yield on raw lumber in their production process. They also sent a link to a video that depicts their use and processing of raw materials.

According to my contacts there, they use the latest technology for ripping and cutting raw lumber in their rough mill. Six cameras view the boards to determine where the boards should be cut to insure they get the most yield from each log being sawn. Ripped boards get marked with a crayon to note defects. A computerized cut off saw reads markings and calculates the best cut for the highest yield. The edging pieces go through the hog to grind up material for shavings which goes to local farms for livestock bedding. A hog is sort of a hammer mill with a rotor with fixed hammers and tips for shredding wood waste, bark, scraps, etc. It makes bigger things small.

They also edge glue wood parts into panels to get a better yield by utilizing otherwise parts too small for commercial use. They try to use as much of our raw materials as we can while minimizing any waste.

Materials that they can't use, they try to recycle locally.

Another company making wood furniture products that I've had some communication with is Harden Furniture. You can see a video presentation of their factory operations (actually the video starts in the forest and follows the processing/building of furniture through shipping). They use very little natural gas and almost no other fossil fuels as most of their facility is heated with wood waste.

They have a strong commitment to sustainable production and describe their activities on the web. This website gives a lot of background on the energy used and impacts in furniture manufacturing as well as a comparison of the net carbon emissions in producing a ton of wood versus other materials (from brick to aluminum). Wood looks pretty good!

There is another example I just was referred to - check out this youtube video of very clever utilization/recycling of materials. My dad (recall the "it'll come in handy if I never use it" comment from a past blog?) would have loved this one!

Finally (and on a different subject) the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just launched the OECD Sustainable Manufacturing Toolkit. You can find some background on this organization on their website.

The toolkit is, according to the OECD website, "designed to help businesses around the world, particularly supply chain firms and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), develop a more viable, socially responsible business approach and make the most of green growth opportunities. It provides a set of 18 internationally applicable, common and comparable key performance indicators to measure and improve the environmental performance of manufacturing facilities. This indicator framework owes to much to the existing variety of environmental and CSR initiatives and offers a potential for future standardization in this area."

The toolkit is specially designed for businesses looking to address sustainability in terms of what it means, how it relates to their business, and how they might benefit from greener production. A bit like this blog!

The Toolkit includes a Start-up Guide, which provides a step-by-step approach to measuring and benchmarking environmental performance, and a Web Portal which provides additional technical guidance, data tools and useful links.

You can download the start-up guide and start reading!

We'll discuss some of the features, applicability and other related elements/issues with the toolkit next time.

Less is more, part 7

2011-09-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

Maximum flexibility with minimum impact

This will be the last in the less is more series and is "tech heavy" again.

In the last posting we described the concept of an error budget as used in design of precision machines and then proposed to apply a parallel concept as a "sustainability budget" for including the environmental/resource impacts in the design process. We hoped with this to design a machine that met both the requirements for machine performance as well as a more sustainable (or at least greener) machine.

We ended with a description of the construction of a sustainability budget following the three basic steps:

Step 1: determine an energy, material and resources (consumables, etc.) model of the machine and its principal components in the form of a series of relationships defining the energy consumption, materials use as a function of machine design or operation. (This might be referred to as energy or materials mapping.)

Step 2: analyze systematically each type of energy and material use in the system and determine the relative performance-energy/material impact (for example, from Ashby charts).

Step 3: combine the energy/materials impacts to yield upper and lower bound estimates of the total energy/material impact of the machine.

We noted that it was important that the embedded energy and materials must be counted.

So, now an example of constructing a sustainability budget.

The critical part of building these budgets (error or sustainability) is accumulating the data needed to populate the budget. Material data sources are very helpful in determining the basic material-performance characteristics (like modulus of elasticity, thermal properties, density) that are of use in machine design as we have seen. But, these need to be “connected” to embedded energy and operating energy consumption for use in a sustainability budget. Although there are many materials texts available, one excellent source of such “connections” is the text book “Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design” by Ashby, Shercliff and Cebon, Elsevier, 2010.

Ashby uses an approach (or strategy) for materials selection which is comprised of four steps:
- translation of design requirements in terms of function, objectives, etc.
- screening to select most usable materials meeting the requirements
- ranking with respect to some set of criteria, and
- documentation on background and history of the material in this or related uses

This strategy attempts to get the best match between the characteristics of materials (or processes if the four steps are used for process selection) and those required by the design (functionality and constraints). We would add, as one of the screening elements, the need to assess environmental compatibility, energy use and embedded energy, global warming gas emission impacts, etc. Embedded energy is that energy that has gone into the mining, conversion, processing, and transportation of the material up to the point it enters our control or manufacturing facility for use in our product.

This would work as follows. The machine designer first determines the specifications required for the precision device as usual as inputs to the left side of figure below (from Dornfeld Precision Engineering, Springer, 2010). A parallel discussion could be had for a process design or system of devices of processes but to simplify the discussion we stay with one device here - a precision machine.

Figure Design to sustainability selection chart, thermal stability example

The designer determines that a critical requirement is that the device should be insensitive to variations in temperature where it operates and, since the device is heavily constrained (meaning the device cannot change size due to temperature variations without experiencing bending - picture a simple beam that is being heated and it is held at each end in a vise. When it heats up it will expand along the length and, if heated enough, eventually bend up or down) the variable set of interest includes the modulus of elasticity, E, the coefficient of thermal expansion, α, and the conduction coefficient, k. This defines how much the material can be deformed with out permanent "plastic" deformation or damage (that is, spring constant), how much the material expands per degree of temperature rise and how readily the material conducts heat.

For this situation, it is known that the combination of Eα/k (or elasticity times thermal expansion divided by the conductivity) should be as low as possible to minimize thermal distortion and that will define a set of suitable materials. We can find a wide range of materials with differing expansion and conduction coefficients. Depending on which of these materials we choose, we can determine the energy or sustainability impact by noting the embedded energy (for example) as a function of the weight or volume of the material (or materials) chosen and the amount needed for the design. For example, the figure below, from Ashby shows the relationship between embedded energy for a range of materials and the embodied energy/m3, or production energy per unit volume. We see that more “exotic” materials, often

Figure Production energy per volume for a range of materials, from Ashby

used for thermal stability have higher embedded energy due to production requirements. This gets us through Step 2 of the sustainability budget creation.

However, it must be noted that there are usually other issues that need to be considered besides embedded energy (such as societal impacts if the material is toxic or hazardous or comes from a region where damage is done in mining or extraction) for a complete assessment of sustainability. Also, it is clear that we could create a set of charts as in the design figure shown first above for other constraints in machine design (chatter or vibration for example, in a milling machine, where the key parameter might include stiffness of the component and the tradeoff could be between cross-sectional area/geometry and stiffness; alternate material choices could be conventional carbon steel, a composite material with high stiffness to weight ratio, or a ceramic (which would also have beneficial thermal properties).

Step 3 of the sustainability budget construction requires combining the energy/materials impacts to yield upper and lower bound estimates of the total energy/material impact of the machine. Summing these for a series of machines in a system would give us a system budget. The most challenging part of this step is determining the “sensitivity” of sustainability to device specifications.

We need to make the same type of analysis relative to the sensitive directions that we are designing our device to protect for error sources and the materials in their configurations we are using to accomplish that. Ideally, following our procedure in the design figure above, we could determine a range of material properties that can be varied to affect the design requirement of concern, for example thermal stability in the above example, but which would have no or minimal effect on embedded energy. This would be a sort of sensitivity analysis to energy or environmental impact similar to that seen in machine stiffness evaluation.

That is, a design/material which allows us to meet design requirements with the maximum of flexibility while having minimal impact on environmental damage would allow the application of the conventional error budget without much additional constraint. It would, in effect, decouple the design and material choice from the sustainability impact for a defined range of conditions.

Let’s look at an example. In the Ashby figure above we can see that, at an embodied energy of about 105 Mj/m3 a wide range of materials exist spanning cast irons and some carbon steels to metal foams. Depending on the density of metal foams their modulus of elasticity can be as far from or as close to their parent material. This is not the case for carbon steels and cast irons. Similarly, thermal properties will vary tremendously between metal foams and cast iron, as will damping characteristics (important in machine tool structures). But, from an embodied energy perspective they are all quite similar. So there is an insensitivity we can take advantage of.

Tradeoffs in energy/materials sustainability (depending on what part of the life cycle it is used in) also need to be considered. Some “static” structures such as heavy machine tool bases which support but do not move with the machine axes can be made of heavier materials as their impact on energy of the machine during the “use” phase will not be large. Components making up the moving portions of the machine will logically expend more energy during their life with than stationary components as with each motion, energy will be expended in moving the component proportional to mass (among other things.)

This was a rather straightforward example discussed above. More detailed examples are suitable for a graduate course discussion but one can get the idea.

The key "takeaway" here is the concept of a selecting a design/material which allows us to meet the design requirements with the maximum of flexibility while having minimal impact on environmental damage. Maximum flexibility with minimum impact! This would, in effect, decouple the design and material choice from the sustainability impact for a defined range of conditions.

Next time we are going to dig into leveraging a bit further with some examples.

Finally, a couple of "plugs" for conferences you may be interested in. We are hosting, at Berkeley, the 19th CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering - "Leveraging technology for a sustainable world" - website is http://lce2012.berkeley.edu/home.html. There is also a "regional meeting" in achieving low CO2 industrial plants - California France Forum on Energy Efficient Technologies - website is http://caffeet.org/. Look forward to meeting some of you at one or both of these!

Less is more, part 6

2011-09-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

Budgeting for sustainability

This will be the second to last in the series and, probably, these will be the most complicated since we are talking about some subtle aspects in the design of machines. But, interesting never-the-less!

In the last posting we looked at Ashby's approach to linking material properties to environmental impacts/resource requirements. This time we'll like to apply this to the an example - the design of a precision machine tool. The material here is adapted from Chapter 12 of my book Precision Manufacturing (Springer, 2010; it's on Amazon if you are interested!). We'll set up the discussion in this posting and complete the story in the next, and final, one.

First, we need a formalism for addressing sustainable design of precision machines. This follows from the formalism used for basic machine design. This is referred to as the "sustainability budget." Let me explain.

In the design of machines, specially precision ones (that is, machines that can operate reliably and repeatably positioning workpieces or tooling to great accuracy and with very high resolution - for example, repeatably positioning something within a couple of microns (or nanometers).) This is often accomplished using a technique called "error mapping" and developing an "error budget." These are methods for accounting for the magnitude and eventual impact of the numerous potential sources of error in a machine’s performance – relative to dimensional accuracy, form error, or surface finish.

One does this by determining the likelihood of errors due, for example, to thermal distortion (remember, things expand when heated and contract when cooled so if a machine component is subjected to either of these due to operation or environment) the component will change shape and that will affect the accuracy of the machine. Seems small but, over long machine components, it adds up. Or, for high accuracy, small temperature changes can have a big effect. Steel, for example, has a coefficient of thermal expansion of 11.7 microns/meter/degree C. So, a steel component 10 cm (or about 4 inches; one tenth of a meter) long that experiences a temperature rise of 5 degrees C during operation will "grow" almost 6 microns due to the thermal expansion. That's a lot in the precision manufacturing community! Larger structures can grow more. And, 5 degrees C is easy to experience in most conventional manufacturing facilities.

We can put the machine in a conditioned environment where the temperature is maintained constant but that cost money and, importantly, uses a lot of energy. Or we can put circulating oil systems on machines with temperature controlled oil to maintain a constant temperature but that adds to the machine's energy footprint also. And, since the circulating system usually runs even when the machine is not producing work, this makes the idle state of the machine almost as bad as the production state.

There are materials with almost zero coefficients of thermal expansion - but they are costly in terms of money and energy to create. So, we'd like to design the machine to have as little sensitivity to thermal distortion while using materials that have lower environmental impact.

One of the concepts in precision machine design relates to identifying, first, the “sensitive direction” in the machine. This is the direction in which an error impacts the part quality: dimension, form, roughness. For example, if you are trying to create a surface with a certain dimension by machining, then you want to control the position of the cutting tool relative to that surface with great accuracy. Any error in the position of the tool relative to the surface will result in an error. So, for this operation, the axis of tool motion towards and away from the surface during machining would be the sensitive direction.

The way we can keep track of all the contributions to the errors in the machine can be referrer to as an "error budget." This budget allowed us to include all sources of error and an estimate of their relative magnitudes and then determine which of these sources actually impacted a sensitive direction resulting in a part error. The term budget is chosen exactly to represent what, like a budget for household expenditures, is available to be distributed over all the requirements for operation. Just as in a household budget where some of the monthly funds must cover groceries, insurance, transportation, etc., in an error budget, we allocate the elements making up the total error in such a way that, when we are done with designing the machine, the cumulative error, in the sensitive direction, do not exceed our requirements.

So, errors in the machine due to thermal effects, loads due to moving workpieces or forces generated in machining (which cause another type of distortion, elastic distortion, due to the elasticity of the material the component is made of), gravity loads, or vibrational excitation due to rotating spindles or tooling, are estimated. From these estimates it is determined by modeling the machine structure kinematically, in what way these errors affect the machine tool operation and accuracy and, then, to what extent they affect the sensitive direction.

Now, an important concept in this method is that an error that exists but does not affect the sensitive direction is not of concern. Meaning, something could be going on in the machine but as long as it does not affect the location of the tool relative to the workpiece in the example we've been discussing, we don't need to worry about it.

This would be like going to a restaurant which serves a fixed price buffet. You could eat a lot, or a little, and, from the point of view of your budget, it wouldn't matter. With graduate students, that means you can eat a lot!

So, in the case of an error source not impacting the sensitive direction, we have a lot more design freedom with no apparent penalty in terms of performance.

So by now you are asking what the heck this has to do with the subject of the blog!

Consider if we would add constraints on the environmental performance of a machine while insisting that the other quality metrics are met as well as the manufacturing performance (throughput, lead time, cost/piece to operate, etc.) This could be included in our budget analysis but, in this case, we’d call it a "sustainability budget". A sustainability budget would operate similarly to an error budget except we would be looking for the impact, from environmental metric point of view, of the design and operation of the precision machine, process or system.

Then, using the idea of sensitive directions (and the complementary concept of non-sensitive directions – that is, those directions for which any error from a specific source has no effect) we can imagine an analysis which measures the impact of materials, designs, or operating conditions on the overall environmental behavior. Then we look for instances of materials, design features or operating conditions that give the largest range of variability, from the point of view of design, with the least environmental impact. That is, those instances for which little or no sensitivity is displayed.

Following a methodology based on this would allow us to design the machine, or system of machines, in such a way that the basic performance, precision and accuracy, would meet the core error budget constraints but, in addition, we could do so in a way that was more sustainable.

Great idea but how do we do this?! Let's get started.

In the design of a precision machine the first requirement is to derive an error budget. Now it gets a bit complicated. Creating an error budget relies on two sets of rules — connectivity and combinational. Connectivity rules define the behavior of machine components and interfaces in the presence of errors. That is, how does the error in one component affect the position (for example) of another component. This is sort of like trying to level a table in a restaurant by sticking little bags of sugar under one of the legs. Sometimes you are lucky and it works the first time. Other times changing one leg makes another lose contact with the floor and the table still wobbles. That's is a simple example but that is connectivity.

Then, the combinational rules define how the errors are to be combined to determine the impact on the accuracy of the workpiece. That means, how all these connected components, experiencing the various sources of error, combine to affect the sensitive direction. Not surprisingly, this is done with mathematics.

The procedure is comprised of the following three steps:

Step 1 — make the model of connectivity. This is called the error map. We do this by determining a kinematic model of the machine and its principal components in the form of a series of matrices,

Step 2 — analyze systematically each type of error in the system and use the mold to determine the relative tool-work errors. This is determining a relationship defining how the errors affect the sensitive direction, and finally

Step 3 — combine the errors to yield maximum and minimum estimates of the total error of the machine. Sort of like specifying tolerances on a part length - the error of importance will likely be within this range.

If we revise this approach for a sustainability budget, we’d follow the same three basic steps but with some different objectives. For example, we would add some elements to the three steps, or, actually, develop a parallel set of “models” and analysis.

Parallel to Step 1 would be:

- determine an energy, material and resources (consumables, etc.) model of the machine and its principal components in the form of a series of relationships defining the energy consumption, materials use as a function of machine design or operation. (This might be referred to as energy or materials mapping.)

Parallel to Step 2 would be:

- analyze systematically each type of energy and material use in the system and determine the relative performance-energy/material impact (for example, from Ashby charts).

Parallel to Step 3 would be:

- combine the energy/materials impacts to yield upper and lower bound estimates of the total energy/material impact of the machine.

Importantly, in this parallel analysis, the embedded energy and materials must be counted. That is, we cannot only look at the energy to move an axis of the machine (for example in a precision machine tool) but we’d need to consider also the energy associated with the earlier material processing and conversion, any subcomponents or subsystems, etc. Also, some measure of global warming gas generation and any other environmental impact effects must be included.

We are, essentially, estimating the footprint of this device we are designing. This makes the analysis rather complex and, unfortunately, not as analytical as the construction of the conventional error budget first described.

But, it makes sense. And, next time, we'll add details and apply this to an example.

Less is more, part 5

2011-08-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

Designing for small

In the last posting we stated that one of the challenges is linking product performance to material shape and properties. And then making the next link to environmental impacts/resource requirements.
An example of some helpful software that connects material properties to potential environmental impacts/burdens was given. By linking the potential burdens to material properties, and then to the design or production requirements, we can try to choose the least impactful material.

So, with respect to either a process/machine for manufacturing (manufacturing phase) or product (use phase), the challenge is to find the design/material/structure combination that:
i. gives the desired performance/meets specifications
ii. can be economically manufactured/operated at sufficient scale with required production rate, quality, and cost,
iii. while minimizing the environmental impact or, better, reducing the impact enough compared to the present performance to offer a "return on investment" that moves the operation of the process or product towards a more sustainable situation.

One of Ashby's techniques to start his analysis (see last posting for more info on Ashby!) is the "use matrix." This matrix arrays, vertically, energy intensive to material intensive products and, vertically, different product "load factors" from high impact to low impact. For example, the categories of energy to material intensity are from primary power consuming to non-power consuming. The primary power consuming products are energy intensive in their use phase and the non-power consuming are, then, material intensive. The figure below is reproduced from Ashby's CES Eco-selector white paper from February 2005.

In this matrix you can see examples of entries in the various categories with an automobile being a primary power consuming high load factor product (meaning the use phase impact is power related) while on the other end of the scale a tent or canoe is low load factor and material intensive since the tent requires no energy to operate so the material consumption in the manufacturing phase is the most significant.

Now, if we looked at manufacturing in the same manner, what could be a “use matrix of manufacturing classes”? Here is my attempt to fill in such a matrix for manufacturing.

You can follow the logic I think. An example of a high load factor energy intensive manufacturing process is something like a furnace for heat treating or a semiconductor manufacturing etch tool. A low load factor manufacturing process or element could be a warehouse or office for a factory which is midway between energy and material intensive depending on the exact activity in that warehouse or office.

Ashby's process uses such a matrix to help determine which phase of the "product" (here a consumer product but in our discussion a piece of manufacturing hardware for a process or factory component), that is material production, product manufacture, product use or product disposal/end of lied, should be focussed on for the largest improvement.

If one is designing or producing high or modest load factor primary power consuming machines for production, such as rolling mills, forming presses or machine tools, etc. as in the manufacturing matrix above, then we would want to consider these four phases relative to those machines.

Let's consider the example of the design of a deep draw press. We'd like to come up with a press that meets the constraints posed at the beginning of this posting - gives the desired performance/meets specifications, can be economically manufactured/operated at sufficient scale with required production rate, quality, and cost, and minimizes the environmental impact.

If you are not sure what these are there is an excellent on-line video on the operation of one made in Taiwan and its manufacture. Note: this is a sales video but informative! The process performed on such a press is more objectively detailed on Wikipedia under deep drawing.

The elements to be considered in the design of a deep drawing press would include:

- Material production: steel mostly (several tons)
- Manufacture: welding (mostly), machining (some), electronics (not many)
- Use: electricity, hydraulic fluid, compressed air and other consumables
- Disposal: scrap (likely sold for re-use)

The design criteria would include:
- tonnage (pressure/power) which determines the size of the part to be made or thickness of the metal formed
- stiffness
- speed/strokes per minute
- ease of load/unload
- die changing/handling/setup

The press capacity is determined by the tonnage it provides for deep drawing while maintaining the necessary stiffness for the accuracy of the forming process. The speed is dependent on the efficiency of the energy to move the press given the weight of its components. A press that move rapidly (up/down strokes) either must be light (and hence low tonnage) or require a lot of energy to move.

Ashby data provides a measure of the relative "cost" in embedded energy of different materials per unit bending stiffness (affecting precision) and mass per unit of bending stiffness (for the speed vs precision tradeoff).

The curve below, from Ashby's software, shows the "trade-off surface" for this energy-mass for a stiffness limited design. The curve shows the range of reasonable candidate materials for achieving the required mass (for speed) and stiffness (for accuracy) normalized by embedded energy. Ideally, following along this curve gives the designer a set of material that will meet these constraints.

We see that one of the materials lying near the curve is cast iron and another is mild steel in the lower right part of the curve- both reasonable cost alternatives. Others on the curve, but with higher cost, are beryllium alloys in the upper left part of the curve- not likely to be used. Also not likely to be used is chipboard which is a bit below the curve. Another material not traditional used but worth considering is carbon fiber reinforced plastic - one the curve near the bend. These fiber-based materials offer very high strength/stiffness and very low mass so could be a new design for presses for high speed but high stiffness with similar embedded energy, for the amount needed, as steel.

These materials (the steel and cast iron at least) are also easily recovered at the end of life and, in fact, lend themselves to re-manufacturing (another good topic we'll delve into sometime) as well.

Next time we'll apply this to the manufacture of a precision machine tool.

Less is more, part 4

2011-08-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

How much less is less?

The last several postings have been discussing the elements of reducing consumption in manufacturing. Not just cutting but making better use of the resources available. This stretched from reviewing the "buy-to-fly" ratio concept to yield issues in metal production and use. We discovered that there is a lot more potential in the material that is left on the floor in production than we might think. In fact, improving material processing yield may actually offer more potential for impact reduction than many other strategies.

But these are technically complex issues. Manufacturers don't waste material on purpose. The swarf from machining is due to material removed to achieve the desired shape. The farther the input workpiece is from the final shape the more material must be removed and shows up as chips on the floor. These chips are routinely recycled of course. But that is a far cry from not using it in the first place.

The term "net-shape processing" (defined as making things to a final or near final shape without removing material - such as forging) is one approach to reducing the amount of material that needs to be removed to achieve the final shape. This cannot address the requirements of surface conditions (like very low roughness) or some form requirements but it goes a long way. This does not work for all materials. But, for example, plastic injection molding is a classic example of net shape forming (except for the runners, sprue, etc. unless done with hot runner systems as in high production.)

The challenge is linking performance to shape and properties. And then making the next link to environmental impacts/resource requirements.

Engineers like to use "tools" for assisting in making these links. By tools we mean software or other analysis methodologies that assist in presenting data or alternatives to the designer, or manufacturing engineer, to be used in decision making. These tools often help the engineer answer questions like

- what is the function of the device or piece of hardware or component that is being designed?
- what are the objectives that need to be optimized?
- what constraints must be satisfied?

These questions are common to all engineering design problems but are part of the concept behind a wonderful tool from Granta Design called the CES (for Cambridge Engineering Selector) methodology developed by Professor Mike Ashby and his colleagues at Cambridge University in England. This was first developed to help engineers and designers to select materials for use in products and components.

They give the example of a design relative to these questions as "For instance, a car body panel (function) needs to be as light as possible (objective) for a specified stiffness and cost (constraint). Other constraints on the design might be acceptable resistance to mechanical impact and to contact with various environments." This is described in great detail on the Granta website.

I need to mention here that I am in no way associated with Granta Design or Mike Ashby and am not being paid to pitch his product or company! We are, in my lab, using this software (and we paid for a license) and I am only a big supporter because it is one of those products that is very useful and enables us to do things we otherwise would not be able to do. I also use Granta software in my class on sustainable manufacturing.

Ashby developed the concept of selection charts that show one type of material property as a function of another - for example elasticity as a function of thermal distortion. So if you are designing a component, say of a machine tool, and you need a material that has a certain stiffness but is less sensitive to temperature variations (and the accompanying distortion, growth with increase in temperature and shrinkage with reduced temperature) then you could see where different material groups fall and choose a material that is in the range desired.

The data is the same data you'd get from a handbook, or tests, or another expert but the method of presenting it offers additional insight to the designer.

For example, the figure below, from the CES EduPack Manual from Granta (this is available on the Granta's website for teaching tools) shows a typical "Ashby chart" plotting Young's modulus (this is the "elastic limit" for materials in load per unit area which serves as a measure of the stiffness of an elastic material) as a function of density (mass/volume).

This would be the kind of information that an auto designer would use to pick a material that has the required stiffness but with the least possible weight (since lighter vehicles require less fuel to move and lighter frames to support them).

Ashby fits the use of this data in assessing material selection impacts over the life cycle of a product. The figure below, also from Ashby and available at the link above, shows the stages of material usage in a product lifecycle. Ashby data makes it easier for an engineer to see

the magnitude of these impacts. And, of course, it gets back to our "make vs use" impact discussion some time ago (for example as part of the material diet discussion). The take away from this figure is that there are materials issues at all stages of product life.

The one limiting element of Ashby is that he looks at product design through the lens of materials and there are, of course, other concerns. But, this is a small issue compared to the benefit of his approach.

So, where does the "green-stuff" come in?

One of the axes of information that Ashby provides is embodied energy (and its equivalent in CO2 emissions). The figure below, also from Ashby, shows embodied energy (GJ/volume) for a wide array of materials. This data, specially when plotted as a function of material parameters, opens up

the possibility of connecting design parameters to environmental impact. The embodied energy data Ashby relies on is generally reliable. In a number of cases the data may reflect a specific region of the world or particular means for processing the material but it is an excellent base to work from. The red dotted line is only for comparison of materials and embodied energy.

As you can see in the figure above, the potential for looking at energy (and thus CO2) impact for materials is wide open. Within a materials group, like polymers, there is a factor of 10 range of embodied energy. Within the ceramics group this range grows to a factor of 1000 (three orders of magnitude.)

Clearly, all these materials in each group do not have the same properties are, hence, are not interchangeable. But, linking them to material properties, then to the design or production requirements, lets chose the best, least impactful, material.

That's where we start next time and we'll include an example.

Less is more, part 3

2011-07-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

Where does the material go?

California is used to the concept of getting more from less. We only have to recall now Governor Jerry Brown's comments when he was governor the first time from 1975 to 1983 and declared that University employees shouldn’t complain about low pay because, as academics, they were getting “psychic rewards.” As a UC faculty member we are now seeing dramatic reductions on state support of education as the campuses, specially Berkeley, charge forward to keep our programs strong. Psychic indeed!

We are not talking about psychic rewards here or starving critical institutions!

We've been talking about making better use of what we start out with (the yield or "buy to fly ratio" approach) as well as process and product design for better results with lower impact.

I have been making good use of Professor Julian Allwood's research at Cambridge University to make the first point. His WellMet 2050 study is inspirational. We'll see more from that below.

Others, like the Air Force SAMI as well as corporate programs are making inroads on this as we discussed in the last posting. TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society) has produced, with support from the DOE and a host of others, a report in January 2011 titled "Linking Transformational Materials and Processing for an Energy-Efficient and Low-Carbon Economy: Creating the Vision and Accelerating Realization." You can download this report from TMS.

The report presents a prioritized set of new products and technologies prepared by TMS working groups focussed on the following themes:

- Functional Surface Technology
- Higher Performance Materials for Extreme Environments
- Multi-Materials Integration in Energy Systems
- Sustainable Manufacturing of Materials

It is a comprehensive forward-looking review of technology.

There are some obvious (to me) gaps however. For example, in the focus on sustainable manufacturing of materials the group highlighted:

- Net-Shape Processing of Structural Metals (that means making things to a final or near final shape without removing material - such as forging)
- Additive Manufacturing of Components and Systems (combining process or materials in reduced number of operations; but not necessarily rapid prototyping - the term usually associated with additive manufacturing)
- Low Cost Processing and Energy Reduction Technology for Metals (reducing the energy requirements for primary processing of metals like titanium, aluminum and magnesium)
- Separation of Materials for Recycling (promoting increased recycling rates), and
- Real-Time Sensor Technology for Gases and Molten Metals (feedback for process optimization and control).

I did not see much reference to increasing yield (except in the net-shape area) but certainly not at the level of importance to address the tremendous losses pointed out by Allwood.

So, let's pick there from the part 2.

The last posting presented a graphical representation of the cumulative yield (output over input) through several process steps and the accompanying cumulative process energy (energy/ton of material input). During the process steps, typically, yield is reduced (meaning material ends up on the shop floor) and, due to processing and material loss, the cumulative energy increases. As noted in the WellMet 2050 report "Going on a Metal Diet" that is the basis of this discussion "…these graphs will show that the (already energy efficient) process of liquid metal production dominates the cumulative energy build-up but yield losses in the downstream supply chain can increase the embodied energy in the final component by a factor of up to 10." Up to 10x increase due to downstream yield losses!

I mentioned that Allwood's study had looked at four case studies. I don't want to repeat the report here (and encourage you read the whole report) but let's look at the cases for aluminum. The figure below shows the cumulative energy (reference to the original liquid aluminum) as a function of cumulative yield (actual product to input liquid metal) for three of the case study products (and click on the

image for better detail) investigated - car door panel, aircraft wingskin panel and beverage can. The various steps in production, from liquid, are shown by the open circles on the graph.

Lines connecting the circles going vertically (or more vertical) indicate processes that preserve yield (that is, less wasted material). Lines going horizontally, (or more horizontal) indicate processes that reduce yield (that is, waste material). This is not necessarily to imply that the material is wasted gratuitously but that the inherent aspects of the process are not able to make efficient use of the material.

For instance, the door panel example, indicates that from cast ingot to stamped panel there is a tremendous loss of material (yield from 1 down to 0.4 meaning 60% of the material not ending up in the product) The actual "buy to fly ratio" would be better than the 0.4 shown on the graph for door panels since the auto manufacturer is unlikely to by aluminum in liquid form. More likely the material enters production as cold rolled coil (at approximately .7 yield) and then is converted to the panel. So, buy-to-fly is closer to 50% form the auto manufacturers perspective.

But you see how this does not tell the complete story - specially with respect to the cumulative energy - since most of that is in the liquid to cold coil processing.

Beverage cans are a similar story. Most material is "lost" from the ingot to cup stage. The can producer likely gets the stock as cold rolled coil. From there, the losses due to can production take the yield from approximately 0.7 to 0.55. From the perspective of the can maker, perhaps, this is a reasonable buy-to-fly ratio.

The figure below, from Kalpakjian and Schmidt's manufacturing text (presented on line), shows a schematic of can making from the original blank through the drawing process and the addition of the cap.

There are two major sources of process related material loss - the blanking of the disks used to start the forming process (think cutting circles out of square sheets) and the disk to first cup process due to the requirement to be able to hold on to the end of the disk during this first stage. There is some trimming at the end also. A similar process is required for the lid which, although not as deeply "drawn" still starts as a circle from a square sheet.

The least efficient from a materials efficiency point of view is the wing skin panel (and recall our earlier comments about aerospace buy-to-fly ratios). This ends up with an overall yield (from melt) of less than 10%. Assuming the manufacturer gets the material as rectangular plate (at about 45% yield) their part of the process yields a buy-to-fly of around 25%.

Recycling, oft mentioned with aluminum and other metals, will help, some. The problem is that with "low yield products" a lot of the material "going back into the pot" will not be post consumer waste but production waste. In the case of aerospace components most of that waste is in the form of metal chips removed to get the desired shape. Granted, aerospace is a special case due to the requirements of the product but this is a lot of material to leave on the shop floor. Composite materials will try to address this but they have material efficiency issues as well.

Next time we'll start the discussion about getting more from the material and, specifically, analysis tools to help us do that.

Running with the big guys

2011-07-04T18:17:00.000-07:00

And now a word from the government!

In honor of the 4th of July celebration here in the US I am taking a break from our discussion about "less is more" to focus on major initiatives to move the cause of green manufacturing forward - these from the government. The discussion on "less is more" will continue with part 3 next time.

We've heard a lot about some of the major corporations and the initiatives they've taken to enhance the sustainability of their organizations and influence their supply chain. One of the first that comes to mind is Walmart and their efforts to insure the products they sell, and their operations delivering them, are "more efficient, last longer and perform better." There are many more players in this field and a simple glance at Environmental Leader or GreenBiz website will give a great introduction and allow you to track their progress.

For example, one recent item on GreenBiz refers to Marks and Spencers "carbon neutral bra" program which complements their "carbon neutral undies." These are, according to GreenBiz, "a way to showcase an energy-efficient factory in Sri Lanka that was built as part of Plan A. The factory is powered, in part, by solar energy and hydropower." (Plan A = Marks and Spencers sustainability effort; 'because there is no plan B'). It was also an exercise in carbon footprinting since the bra contains some 21 component parts from 12 different suppliers. The article states that M&S are offsetting the CO2 generated by the bra’s manufacturing and shipping by planting 6,000 trees in Sri Lanka. Since some of these trees are lime and mango trees there is the potential to generate income for farmers in the area.

Meanwhile, on the US fashion-eco front, one of our research collaborators Sarah Krasley, alerted me to the fact that Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress will become an exhibit in America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. The "dress" from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards will be part of a display at the museum in the 'Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power' exhibition. Another reason to visit Cleveland this summer.

You will recall that the outfit was made entirely of raw animal flesh and generated an "environmental reaction" which I commented on. The dress has apparently been preserved to prevent deterioration so is, according to Sarah, likely to be rather like a "jerky dress."

But the story here is on government initiatives. First, one announced by President Obama recently on manufacturing.

Berkeley will be one of the six universities in the US participating in the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). The AMP is being developed based on the recommendation of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which released a report June 24 entitled “Ensuring Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing.” The PCAST report calls for a partnership between government, industry and academia to identify the most pressing challenges and transformative opportunities to improve the technologies, processes and products across multiple manufacturing industries.

According to the PCAST report, manufacturing has been declining as a share of U.S. GDP and employment, and the loss of U.S. leadership in this domain has not been limited to low-wage jobs in low-tech, conventional industries; the United States is also trailing in high-tech industries that employ highly-skilled workers. The U.S. trade balance in advanced technology manufactured products shifted from surplus to deficit starting in 2001, according to PCAST.

The report lays out three compelling reasons why the US should strive to revitalize its leadership in manufacturing, and in particular advanced manufacturing, as:
1. Jobs: Manufacturing that is based on new technologies, including high-precision tools and advanced materials, can provide high-quality, good-paying jobs for American workers.
2. Innovation: It is not enough to invent in America and manufacture abroad. By keeping manufacturing local, a number of synergies ensue through which the design, engineering, scale-up, and production processes feed back on the conception and innovation sectors to generate new ideas and novel second- and third-generation products.
3. Security: Domestic manufacturing capabilities using advanced technologies and techniques are vital to maintaining national security.

One of the specific program goals is increasing the energy efficiency of manufacturing processes; and developing new technologies that will dramatically reduce the time required to design, build, and test manufactured goods.

First of all, anything that shines a little more light on manufacturing is great. Second, one of the objectives is energy efficiency of manufacturing processes. To me, this includes all of the approaches to green manufacturing we've been discussing here. The "design to production" element is also good for greening manufacturing if we can insure that sustainable design decisions are made early in the process and, to re-iterate Walmart's focus, make sure products are more efficient, last longer and perform better.

For our part at Berkeley we'll make sure that green manufacturing, as part of jobs, innovation and security, is an integral part of the discussion.

But there is more, also from a government organization. This time the Defense Department.

The Air Force has launched a sustainable manufacturing initiative. This in response to the 2010 Department of Defense Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan (SSPP). The SSPP identifies goals for meeting the intent of Executive Order 13514 “Federal Leadership in Environmental Energy and Economic Performance.” An essential component to sustainable acquisition and procurement is sustainable manufacturing.

A white paper on line gives a lot more detail on the Air Force ManTech Sustainable Aerospace Manufacturing Initiative - acronym SAMI. From the white paper, the purpose of SAMI is to "fulfill Department of Defense (DoD), AF, and industry strategic intent for sustainability by maturing sustainable manufacturing practices that will enhance the production capability necessary to process and fabricate DoD weapons systems with optimized energy footprints and environmentally sustainable processes while preserving performance requirements." SAMI operates out of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Materials and Manufacturing Directorate.

Specific program goals include:
- Develop assessment tools for identifying manufacturing process step-changes
- Demonstrate sustainable technologies in military unique process
- Design for sustainability
- Produce military systems with less energy
- Minimize environmental impacts
- Reduce environmental footprint associated with manufacturing without compromising capability or end product performance

The Air Force is partnering with a number of organizations on this including the LMAS of UC-Berkeley (my lab), the NCDMM in Pennsylvania, and several organizations in the supply chain such as General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, Remmele Engineering, and GKN Aerospace in addition to others.

The importance of all these initiatives, from Walmart and Marks & Spencers to the Air Force, is that they are laying the groundwork for systematically designing, procuring and manufacturing, distributing, selling and, eventually, recovering products covering a wide range of "consumer needs."

Big organizations driving big effects. That's worth some fireworks!

Next time we'll continue with "less is more" part 3.

Less can be more! Part 2

2011-06-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Where did all the material go?

Some time ago (July last year to be specific) we discussed the concept of "buy to fly ratio" used to track the ratio of the amount of material that an aircraft manufacturer starts with to the amount that actually ends up on the airplane. It was part of a discussion on degrees of perfection and was a led in to a series of discussions about how to actually measure the impact of what we are doing in terms of "greening" manufacturing. That is, if we keep track of everything - are we ahead at the end of the day or not?

The buy-to-fly ratio came out of the aerospace industry but has applicability to manufacturing broadly. Unfortunately, numbers for this ratio are not too impressive and I cited some published from aircraft manufacturing that are in the 30's - meaning only a bit over 3% of the material purchased actually ends up on the plane. This waste for machined components is usually in the form of chips - which are recycled of course but discarded never-the-less.

And here is the issue. Even with recycling of "wasted" materials in manufacturing we use energy and resources. So, recycled content is not free!

Recall Henry Ford's comments cited in one of the first postings for this blog on "why green manufacturing" two years ago: "… we will not so lightly waste material simply because we can reclaim it — for salvage involves labour. The ideal is to have nothing to salvage." This was published in his book "Today and Tomorrow" (1926).

At that time Henry was probably generating his own electricity from "waste" steam from steel or coke making or wood chips from his wooden frame production so he wasn't even thinking about the cost of energy. And, I don't think the concept of global warming/CO2 was a topic of discussion then.

(Note: Today's Ford Motor Company is fully engaged in energy and resource efficiency in both product and manufacturing. You can find their CSR report online)

So, back to the chips (or the "hole").

The International Society of Industrial Ecology just held their annual meeting in Berkeley. One of the attendees was Professor Julian Allwood from Cambridge University and we had a chance to meet up and talk a bit about his work under the banner of "WellMet 2050." I introduced this project in a blog earlier this year on 'resource dieting.' He is a creative thinker about green manufacturing challenges and firmly grounded in processes and analysis.

One of the big 4 themes of their research is "less metal, same service" and Julian was discussing, basically, the "buy to fly ratio" problem. He focusses specially on metals in his research.

The details are documented in the "Going on a metal diet" report from the study and you can download it from their website.

One focus of the study as part of the "less metal, same service" is on reducing the scrap in manufacturing. There is a common misconception (or, at least, benign neglect) that recycling hits the reset button on inefficient use of material. This is a big mistake!

Inefficient use of materials is usually referred to as yield loss. That is, in the course of normal manufacturing (whether you are making airplanes, automobiles, semiconductors or polo shirts) material gets 'left on the foor.' Shapes are cut out of sheets and the bits around the shape that need to be held in the press, or due to standard size sheets larger than the part being produced, etc. are left over.

At best these leftover pieces are large enough to be used for other pieces (a concept called "nesting" in manufacturing). At some point there is not enough material left to be used productively in the operation and it is discarded and, hopefully, recycled.

Recall that recycled can mean anything from remelting and added to virgin material for making new sheets of material (as used here); mixed with other similar materials to produce lower quality metal; or collected and dumped somewhere (recycled to you - waste to the collection organization).

Take a peak at the Ricoh Comet circle from prior blogs to see the various paths of "down cycling" of materials.

The metal diet report states boldly "Going on a metal diet has much greater potential for CO2 emissions abatement than the pursuit of further efficiency measures in an already efficient liquid metals production process." So Professor Allwood's research team is focussed on the data to prove that statement.

First, let's define what we mean by yield. The figure below, from Allwood's "Going on an energy diet" shows how yield is determined based on the ratio of

metal going on to a downstream process over the sum of all process inputs. That which is not part of yield along the process chain is lost.

Now, how about the connection between the yield losses and the embodied energy of the material? Allwood has used a very novel way to display this that pretty clearly points out the challenge.

In the graph below, also from Allwood's "Going on an energy diet" report, the horizontal, x, axis shows the "yield path" of a material amount during processing through several steps. That is, starting with 1 ton of liquid metal, it plots the mass remaining after each step of the process. This, essentially tracks the buy to fly ratio across several process steps. The vertical, y, axis shows the cumulative increase in embedded energy with each process step. Constant embodied energy contours are shown.

Reading this figure, for a specific product, tracks the consumption of energy and the loss of mass of the product (relative to the original raw material input at the start). You'd start with the liquid metal, cast it into billets or other shapes, rolled/formed into finished raw material stock (like sheet or bar) and then further processed by stamping or cutting, then finishing, etc. to yield the final product. These process steps are the "process AB" and "process BC" shown in the individual lines of product manufacture on the chart. You'd use as many process steps as needed to complete the product.

One interesting thing to note is that if you want to maintain constant embodied energy in the manufacture of the product you need to follow the constant energy contours.

We will see that this is the real manufacturing engineering challenge for green manufacturing!

In the next posting we'll show some examples of real products from this study (like a beverage can or a car door panel) to illustrate the use of this energy yield vs material yield chart.

Once we are comfortable with the metrics for measuring our success (or documenting our failure!) we'll talk about engineering tools to overcome this scenario in product design and manufacture.

Less can be more!

2011-06-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Or, keep your eye on the hole!

My father had an interesting expression he would bring out when my brother and I would be worried about something or, more likely, be interested in a "short term gain" in some venture. And, mind you, he lived through the depression and many years in the Army Air Force during the war in the Pacific so had the authority to use these kinds of expressions.

He'd remind us "as you wander down life's highway, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut, and not upon the hole."

I always liked that and believed it put a lot of things in perspective as one's career moves along. I've used this from time to time when the situation seems relevant.

But, I found an exception to this wise advice ... or I think I found an exception. We recently spent some time on a vacation trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks in Wyoming. Along with the impressive scenery (and impressive amount of snow still around at this late date in June) I was also struck by the efforts of the concessionaires (those who run the lodging, shops and restaurants) in these parks to "go green."

One in particular, Xanterra (they are a descendent of The Fred Harvey company), in Yellowstone has taken this very seriously. They even have a sustainability report on their corporate website and state that they are working to reduce their footprint in "energy, carbon emissions, waste, development, foods, transportation, and water."

This is good. There is nothing more troubling, to me at least, than wasting a lot of fuel, water, electricity to see nature while trying to live greener.

So, the hole.

One of the things Xanterra puts in the rooms in their lodges in Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Zion, Crater Lake, etc. is bath soap with a hole in the center! They call it "waste reducing exfoliating body cleanser" - but it's soap.

The soap is called Green Natura (see the website if you don't believe me) and the package, made of recycled materials and printed with soy inks of course, says that the soap is "ergonomically shaped waste reducing" and has been designed to "eliminate the unused center of traditional soap bars."

So, this is neat. It has the size and shape of a more standard bar of soap without all the material that usually gets wasted/thrown away after a stay in a hotel. I like that. I know I should use the liquid soap dispensers in many bathrooms/showers which leave nothing (except the dispenser, etc.) to be wasted but there is something enjoyable about using a real bar of soap. I must note that there are some "other opinions" about whether or not this is really green (see, for example, the green soap site.) But, for the moment, let's focus on the hole!

Unfortunately my father is not around to see this product … it might cause a ripple in his "don't watch the hole" adage. But, to be fair, he never threw away the center of the soap. In our family there was no wasted soap - you just stick the last bit on top of the new bar and get on with it.

This, of course, does not work in hotels.

In this case, removing unused/un-needed/unwanted material is good. Actually, you might have seen this before in your undergraduate engineering studies (if you are an engineer!) where you learned to design simply supported beams with varying cross-sections to accommodate moments due to loading that cause the moment to be greater at the mid-span than at the ends. Making the beam of uniform shape along its length would add unnecessary weight and waste material.

There are better examples for real products, like automobiles, that tie into our green discussion. According to what I've seen recently, a new GM car, the Cruz ECO, has higher gas mileage due to reduced weight among other improvements.

The Cruz Eco article posted on Motley Fool (and based on an article by Wolfgang Gruener, of Conceivably Tech titled "Chevy Cruze Eco: 58 MPG, No Hybrid Magic") has shown remarkable fuel economy for a "conventional" internal combustion engine vehicle. According to the article the most significant changes implemented in the Eco are:

• Weld flanges reduced 1 mm to 2 mm in length
• Metal gauge thickness reduced by 1 mm
• Lightweight 17-inch wheels
• Low-resistance tires
• Revised gear ratios (particularly first, second, and sixth gears).
• Unique front fascia with deeper front air dam
• Electronically controlled front air shutter that closes at higher speeds to reduce drag
• Metal pans below the car to improve air flow
• No spare tire (!)
• Lowered suspension
• Trunk-lid spoiler

The article states that these changes reduce the vehicle weight by 125 pounds (compared to 3,134 pounds for the Cruze LS) and 214 pounds less than the Cruze 1LT. Also, according to GM, the reductions in things like weld flanges saved several pounds and smaller wheels save 21 pounds compared to the 1LT version. Other improvements dealing with aerodynamics reduced the Eco's drag coefficient by about 10% below the other Cruze models. That means it can move through the air with less resistance - better gas mileage.

The article states that all these changes resulted in a notable improvement in fuel efficiency. In tests run by the author of the article, stop-and-go driving yielded 32.3 MPG, and suburban driving with a mix of streets ended up at 39.8 MPG. Extremely careful cruising on the interstate at exactly 55 MPH resulted in a "stunning" 57.9 MPG.

You might recall the discussion here in the September 2009 posting about precision manufacturing and green. In that posting we discussed a Boeing example of tolerances (posted under the title "Little things matter"). A reduction in machining tolerances from +/- 0.006 inches to +/- 0.004 inches on the features of an airframe accounted for a weight reduction of 10,000 pounds/aircraft and substantial fuel savings (8%). This allowed an increase of 10% in passengers (engines don't need to carry as much plane), and substantial reduction in manufacturing cost of the aircraft (less material and improved assembly). And less fuel consumption means reduced CO2 impact from operation.

So, we've seen examples of this before.

This clearly shows some nice leveraging of manufacturing but this leads to a follow on set of questions:

- can we do this more generally for manufacturing processes/machinery/tooling as well?
- what kind of analytical or engineering tools can we use to formalize the design of such processes/machinery/tooling?

We'll focus on that in the next posting - part 2 of "keep your eye on the hole!"

Considering the energy of labor - Part 4

2011-05-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

Or, offshore all your troubles?

This posting concludes our discussion of the energy of labor based on a paper published some time ago and the recent thesis of one of my students, Teresa Zhang. The paper, titled "Energy Use per Worker-Hour: A Method of Evaluating the Contribution of Labor to Manufacturing Energy Use," was presented at the 14th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering in 2007.

This does not cover this topic in any sense. But, I hope, it gets the conversation started. There will be more on this in the future for sure.

Now, back to the discussion.

The necessity of excluding industrial energy use from the calculations, as discussed earlier in this series, is observed when comparing net importers and net exporters. For example, consider the $214 billion trade deficit between the United States and China in 2006. Energy used in China to manufacture goods for sale in the United States does not contribute to the Chinese EPWH. Meanwhile, energy the United States imports in the form of products can be captured by process-based LCA.

For simplicity, these results do not consider geographic differences in the number of workers employed for any given task or the purchasing power and related energy consumption of industry workers compared to the general population.

This type of analysis raises a lot of questions and some were hinted at last time. Some industrial processes are more labor intensive than others (think apparel manufacturing or electronics assembly.) Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that is a major manufacturer of electronics products, employs close to 1 million workers and recently was in the news for an explosion at a plant with some 80,000 workers (yep - 80,000 all assembling products) due to a build up of dust (see New York Times article). This plant assembles, among other things, many of Apple's iPads. (Supply chain issues deja vu!).

Different countries have differing impacts due to energy production or efficiencies in delivering energy to industry. How does this play into the discussion?

The biggest question … does this justify exporting all labor intensive industry to "make our numbers look good?!"

You might recall a posting last March (see Digging Deeper). In that I reviewed the work of Professor Julian Allwood at Cambridge University in the UK. He discussed in detail strategies for reducing the carbon footprint and other impacts of manufacturing. He particularly discussed these with reference to targets for reduction set by governmental agencies in the UK and elsewhere. For example, reduction targets set by the UK and EU to allow surface temperature stabilization called for a 60% absolute cut in yearly carbon emissions by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. He plotted the slope of reductions (in CO2 equivalent) needed to meet this ambitious goal along with the actual reductions observed over the first few years which seemed to track each overt reasonably well, But, then, he showed these actual reductions adjusted to "off shore" effects, that is, moving the production and associated CO2 generation out of the region of calculation (i.e. out of the UK and EU). With that, The curve of "improvement" the moved in the wrong direction - that is, diverging from the desired trajectory - due to the off-shoring.

Without quantifying the energy use of labor, it is easy to underestimate the environmental impacts of labor intensive processes such as those referred to above as well as those used in such tasks as product installation, maintenance, repair, and recycling. For example, energy payback time analyses for solar cells often do not consider panel installation, even though it is a major component of their financial cost. Evaluating the energy use of labor is necessary to determine the impact of expensive and labor-intensive solar cell installation on energy payback time.

Labor-intensive sorting processes for recycling are another important application of the energy use of labor. It is important to know the degree to which the energy expended in sorting processes counteracts the energy savings of recycling. There many benefits to recycling outside of energy savings, but the ratio of energy inputs, including that of labor, to energy savings can serve as a measure of efficiency for recycling operations.

The degree of labor required between industries can vary dramatically as pointed out earlier. In addition to electronics assembly, agriculture, handcraft, textile, and service industries are especially labor-intensive. These industries have typically not been the subject of life-cycle analysis, even though their products are consumed in relatively large quantities. Process-based LCA would in fact grossly underreport the environmental costs of a service or an entirely handmade product.

It is also interesting to note that new industries, such as the renewable energy and nanotechnology industries, typically employ more workers per unit output than more established industries. Emerging industries may present problems for LCA practitioners seeking to perform comprehensive assessments. As EIO-LCA data is not yet available for the industry in question, new technologies must be assessed using process-based or hybrid EIO-LCA. Evaluating the energy use of labor is therefore especially valuable to accurately assess the environmental impacts of new technologies and industries.

Amortizing non-industrial energy supply produces a simple estimate of energy use per worker-hour. However, there are questions regarding how to apply this information.

At first glance, the data in the figure showing electricity equivalent energy use per worker hour in part 3 of this series last time appears to present a strong argument for the export of labor-intensive industries. Yet, energy savings in labor can be easily overturned by energy use in transportation. Intercontinental shipping can consume 1.8 MJ per container-mile, based on industry standard emissions of 85 g CO2 per container-km. In the United States, a container truck expends 750 MJ per mile, in addition to the energy use of the operator. Energy analysis may be a useful tool for siting manufacturing facilities, but the energy requirements of both labor and transportation must be considered.

However, industrial final consumption does not include industrial transportation. This means that the energy use of industrial transport is not subtracted from the first equation in part 3, and is therefore encompassed by energy use per worker-hour. If used in conjunction with process-based LCA, energy use per worker-hour double counts the energy use of industrial transportation. This is a major drawback of this technique that must be addressed to be used with process-based transportation inventories.

It is also not entirely straightforward to decide the number of worker-hours to evaluate in life-cycle assessment. An employee may work eight hours a day, but he or she will continue to expend energy outside of work. Manufacturers reap the rewards of the energy expended during worker- hours in the form of value added to their products and should be responsible for a proportional amount of energy. For the purposes of process-based life-cycle assessment, we recommend calculating the energy corresponding to the number of hours actually worked.

However, one can argue that employers, as a whole, are responsible for the economic activity and corresponding energy consumption employees enjoy outside of work as a result of their hours worked. While the economic activity of both employer and employee are required to sustain manufacturing, consider a factory that employs all workers for only four hours a day. Twice the numbers of workers are needed compared to an identical factory employing workers for eight hours a day. Though these half-time employees would be compensated less and enjoy less economic activity, it is doubtful that their energy demands would be half of that of their full-time colleagues.

Another factor to consider is the effect of feedback. A facility built in a low energy use per worker-hour area may find that its presence spurs economic activity, development, and in turn, increased energy use per worker-hour. It is important to note that energy use, industrial activity, and population can change over time. To be meaningful, energy use per worker- hour should reflect up-to-date statistics.

Evaluating energy use per worker-hour is a simple and effective way to improve the accuracy and scope of life-cycle energy analysis. This 4 part discussion makes note of energy use per worker-hour as it compares to a machine tool and to worker- hours in other major manufacturing regions. The potential applications of the energy use of labor in life-cycle assessment are exceedingly broad.

If you'd like a copy of the paper on which this 4 part series is based "Energy Use per Worker-Hour: A Method of Evaluating the Contribution of Labor to Manufacturing Energy Use," by Teresa Zhang and myself from the 14th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, 2007 please contact me directly.

Considering the energy of labor - Part 3

2011-05-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Or, man vs machine

In the last posting I described three methods for of estimating energy use per worker-hour (EPWH) and the preference was amortizing non-industrial energy supply since, in our opinion, it yields the most accurate estimate of energy use per industrial worker-hour for use in process-based or hybrid economic input-output life-cycle assessment.

We now use this method for an example calculation and accompanying discussion. A short recap to keep us all on the same page.

In this method a value of EPWH is derived from the non-industrial energy supply which includes all primary energy except that supplied to industry. It was defined by the expression

EPWH = (TPES - IPES)/(population x hours / year)

where TPES is a country or region’s total primary energy supply and IPES is industrial primary energy supply. Since IPES is not always readily available, we can approximate it using industrial final consumption (IFC) and total final consumption (TFC) of energy calculated as follows

IPES = TPES x IFC/TFC

This expression assumes the ratio of final consumption to primary energy supply for industry is representative of the ratio of final consumption to primary energy supply for the country.

Now an example comparing the relative energy demands of a worker with a piece of manufacturing machinery operated, in some cases, by a human or, in other cases, totally automated.

The energy use of labor in the United States is significant relative to the energy use of a machine tool and of labor in other major manufacturing countries and regions. The energy use of labor may also be used to more accurately evaluate labor intensive processes and industries.

Though there are significant differences between the capabilities of a worker and a machine tool, it is an interesting exercise to compare their relative energy demands. In the US, electricity production from primary energy is approximately 35% efficient (Source: EIA, 2005, Annual Energy Review 2005, US DOE). This conversion factor is used to compare primary EPWH with machine tool electricity use.

As shown in the figure below, the 2.9 kWh of electricity equivalent EPWH that we equate to 30 MJ of primary EPWH is comparable to the power consumption of an automated milling machine but is considerably less than that of a production scale machining center (Source: Dahmus, J. B., Gutowski, T. G., "An Environmental Analysis of Machining," In Proc. ASME IMEC, November, 2004). The figure shows the electricity equivalent energy use per worker-hour in the US based on 2004 data as

Comparison of electricity equivalent of machines and labor

compared to the hourly electricity requirements of four common milling machines produced in the years indicated, adapted from Dahmus. Note that this is plotted on a semi-log scale.

There have been a number of comprehensive analyses of machining including all the material production, cutting fluid preparation and machine operation. In addition other studies have looked at the embedded energy of machine tool building, delivery, installation, operation and repair, and, eventually, end of life.

Assuming the manual milling machine requires one worker to operate, a worker-hour contributes 2.9 kWh to the 0.7 kWh the machine consumes directly each hour (from Dahmus, cited above). The actual energy impact of manual milling is therefore 3.5 kWh (person plus machine) or five times greater than previously thought. As a component of process-based LCA, this higher energy use may be reflected in a wide range of products and services.

A decision making application of energy use per worker-hour for the milling machine used in this analysis shows that if a worker is able to operate four or more machines at a time, it is advantageous from an energy point of view to employ the automated milling machine even though it directly uses four times more energy per hour than the manual milling machine. Energy use per part will scale with production rate for each machine. This is illustrated in the figure below.

Electricity equivalent energy use, including labor and machine operation, for manual and automated machine configurations.

This means that, from a trade-off of production vs energy requirements, for a small operation involving few operations it may be advantageous to use a human worker with a manual machine (that is one with little or no automation.) For a more complex series of machining processes, it may be advantageous to use automated machinery attended by a human worker (as opposed to a fully automated autonomous machining line with no human involvement).

There is something missing from this. For example, if you are comparing two automated machines (or more) operating without human assistance then you need some kind of work and tooling transfer system to keep the machines operating from part to part. This is not included in this analysis. A 'typical' small part handling robot from Fanuc lists .2kWh as operating requirements. If one of these was required for each automated machine (ie without a human worker) we'd need to add that to the machine requirements. In addition, there might be some other material handling machinery as well adding more to this. That will shift the break-even to the right in the above figure.

In addition, this data on machine energy consumption is from a few years back and there have been improvements in machine energy efficiency since then. However, this would only shift the "break-even" to the left slightly.

The data above is for the US. In countries where the primary energy use per worker hour is different from the US (usually lower, and sometimes substantially lower) this "break-even" point will move further out to the right. Meaning, the worker will be required to attend more automated machines to make the automated production to maintain this advantage.

Major manufacturing countries demonstrate a wide range of energy use per worker-hour values, as shown in the figure below.

Primary energy use per worker-hour in major manufacturing countries and regions

These differences can be attributed to a complex set of factors. A very important factor is undoubtedly population. With the exception of the United States, the five most populous countries evaluated represent the countries with the lowest values for energy per worker-hour.

There is also an inverse relationship between EPWH and ratio of industrial final consumption to total final consumption. For the countries evaluated, this ratio ranges from 19% for the United States to 41% for China. In general, the more a country expends in manufacturing, the less energy is expended per worker-hour. These trends may suggest relationships between service and manufacturing economies and development, or they may simply be attributed to the calculation of EPWH.

The necessity of excluding industrial energy use from the calculations, as discussed earlier in this series, is observed when comparing net importers and net exporters. For example, consider the $214 billion trade deficit between the United States and China in 2006. Energy used in China to manufacture goods for sale in the United States does not contribute to the Chinese EPWH. Meanwhile, energy the United States imports in the form of products can be captured by process-based LCA.

For simplicity, these results do not consider geographic differences in the number of workers employed for any given task or the purchasing power and related energy consumption of industry workers compared to the general population.

Now, this type of analysis raises a lot of questions. Some industrial processes are more labor intensive than others (think apparel manufacturing or electronics assembly.) Different countries have differing impacts due to energy production or efficiencies in delivering energy to industry. How does this play into the discussion? Should we, based on all this, simply export all labor intensive industry to "make our numbers look good?!" The obvious answer should be no. But, we'll get into that next time.

Considering the energy of labor - Part 2

2011-05-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

Or Carbs vs Kilowatts

We'll keep charging forward with the discussion about the value of human labor in manufacturing and how to consider it in life cycle analyses of differing processes and techniques of production.

First, a clarification. This posting has nothing to do with forced labor, illegal child labor, excessive conditions and workplace violations, improper safety standards for labor, low wages, etc. These are all critically important issues potentially affecting a wide range of companies and their manufacturing procedures - but, that is not what this discussion is about.

Our concern here is how to respond to the question -if a company reduces the amount of machinery used in manufacturing and replaces that machinery with manual labor does that help from an environmental or green manufacturing perspective? I postulated that for assembly tasks one might make the argument that more human labor (replacing automation) might produce the product using less energy and resources and, ultimately, making the product easier to disassemble at its end of life. But we'd need to consider the quality of the labor (meaning is it dull and repetitive or intellectually stimulating and, for sure, is it free from danger or other safety issues.)

It is conceivable that understanding this "tradeoff" might define a new economic situation that could actually encourage improved workplace environments for manual workers. We can see.

But, for the meantime …we'll focus on the analytical basis for answering the above question. And our discussion in this posting will be rather academic.

To recap, the methodology being described here from the paper we wrote and referred to in the last posting is related to economic input-output (EIO) LCA. Energy of labor and EIO-LCA should not be applied at the same level of analysis because many sources of energy use would be double counted. However, energy of labor can be very effective if incorporated into hybrid process-based EIO-LCA. The energy use of labor enriches the horizontal scope of process-based LCA, while EIO captures vertical supply chain impacts.

The energy use of labor helps address the disparities between environmental and economic accounting. Environmental analysis largely ignores labor, while the cost of labor factors very heavily into economic analysis. Evaluating the energy use of labor can help reduce the gap between those who prioritize environment and those who prioritize economics.

Finally, human capital, like environmental capital, has externalities that can be passed from a manufacturing system to society at large. For example, manufacturers who pay workers less than a livable wage rely on social programs to support their workforce. The energy use of labor is a tool with which we can begin to account for the environmental externalities of labor.

How do we estimate the energy use per worker-hour?

Three straightforward methods of estimating energy use per worker-hour (EPWH) are presented to produce a lower bound, an upper bound, and a value appropriate for use in life-cycle assessment. The methods are respectively derived from human metabolic activity, total primary energy supply, and non-industrial energy supply and described below.

Metabolic activity - A lower bound estimate (one that's likely to give the lowest estimate) of energy use per worker-hour is given by human metabolic activity. An active individual can expend 2800 kilocalories per day or, on average, 0.5 MJ per hour. However, this method fails to consider the much greater amount of energy embodied in and used in the infrastructure employed to support labor. Nor does this consider efficiency losses from food production to digestion.

Primary energy supply - An upper bound estimate (that's one that is likely to give the highest estimate) is given by amortizing a country or region’s energy supply across its worker population and over the number of hours in a year.

Last time we referred to the work of Odum. In his book "Environmental Accounting (Odum, H. T., 1996, Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, Wiley and Sons, New York) he calculates the national fuel share per person based on the general population. Based on 1993 data, he concluded that 967 MJ are expended per capita per day or approximately 40 MJ per capita per hour.

However, not all members of the general population are productive workers at any given time. Just as a machine tool must be manufactured and have an end of life, a worker must have a childhood and an end of life. By amortizing energy use over the worker population, we account for the full life cycle of the worker. We therefore allocate energy use over the worker population, as opposed to the general population, to give us a better estimate of the contribution of labor to the energy use of a production system.

This upper bound estimate considers all the infrastructure and services that go into supporting a worker in terms of primary energy. Primary energy is measured in the units of tons of oil equivalent (TOE). Unlike final consumption in the form of refined fuels or electricity, primary energy captures all transformation and distribution losses.

However, energy use per worker-hour (EPWH) calculated based on primary energy cannot be used as a component of process- based life-cycle assessment because this method double counts industrial energy use.

Non-industrial energy supply - A better estimate of energy use per worker-hour for the industrial sector is derived from non-industrial energy supply, which includes all primary energy except that supplied to industry, as given by the equation below:

EPWH = (TPES - IPES)/(population x hours / year)

where TPES is a country or region’s total primary energy supply and IPES is industrial primary energy supply. IPES can be replaced with primary energy supply to other sectors of the economy or specific industrial sectors, such as the petrochemical sector, to reflect a particular product or process.
Energy use per worker-hour, in terms of primary energy, captures the energy mix and efficiencies in transformation and distribution for a given region. However, IPES is not always readily available, so we approximate it using industrial final consumption (IFC) and total final consumption (TFC) of energy calculated as follows

IPES = TPES x IFC/TFC

This assumes the ratio of final consumption to primary energy supply for industry is representative of the ratio of final consumption to primary energy supply for the country. Countries with industries that consume disproportionately more primary energy than the country at large are penalized by this assumption, resulting in a larger value of EPWH.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) regularly compiles and publishes values for TPES, IFC, and TFC from each country or region in its purview (see IEA website). As defined by the IEA, the industrial sector includes mining, smelting and construction but does not include transportation used by industry. The most current data available reflects 2004 activity.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a branch of the United Nations that similarly compiles employment statistics on an annual basis. Worker populations include civilian workers over an employment age, which is typically 14-16 years of age. Though there are disparities in what each country reports, data from the IEA and the ILO is likely more reliable than data compiled from each country directly.

Of the three methods discussed, amortizing non-industrial energy supply (the last method presented above) yields the most accurate estimate of energy use per industrial worker-hour for use in process-based or hybrid economic input-output life-cycle assessment. We'll use this method for the examples and accompanying discussion in the remainder of this presentation on energy of labor.

We'll pick up from here in Part 3 next time with an example comparing the differences between workers and manufacturing machinery.

Considering the energy of labor - Part 1

2011-04-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Or, looking at all the actors

The last posting ended up with a short discussion about automation vs manual labor and whether or not that should (or could) influence the effectiveness of green manufacturing strategies. It actually plays into the larger issue of measuring social impacts/benefits/costs of any green manufacturing technology wedge as we move to sustainable manufacturing.

Recall the the "triple bottom line" of sustainability - economic, societal and environmental. This term was, apparently, originally mentioned by John Elkington in 1994 (he called it the 3-P's: profit, people and planet) according to The Economist and the "people" part referred to "a measure in some shape or form of how socially responsible an organisation has been throughout its operations." The Economist article sums the approach up using a "balanced scorecard" approach and reminding us of the fundamental principle of "what you measure is what you get, because what you measure is what you are likely to pay attention to. Only when companies measure their social and environmental impact will we have socially and environmentally responsible organizations."

I'm fine with that. The measure part is the tricky bit - specially for social impact - but folks are working on that. In Bhutan, for example, a former king introduced the concept of "gross national happiness" (GNH) as part of a way to build an economy in Bhutan that would respect the unique cultural and spiritual values of the country (See Wikipedia, for example, or the GNP website for details.) This is in contrast to gross domestic (or national) product, GDP or GNP, that are usual measures of progress.

You can even take a GNH survey on line. Other academics and social scientists pursued this line of thinking and have come up with "index values" of GNH comprised of an average per capita of some rather logical components (again taken from the Wikipedia reference above):

1. Economic Wellness: a measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio and income distribution
2. Environmental Wellness: a measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic
3. Physical Wellness: a measurement of physical health metrics
4. Mental Wellness: a measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline of psychotherapy patients
5. Workplace Wellness: a measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints, etc.
6. Social Wellness: a measurement of discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates
7. Political Wellness: a measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts

You may recall that in the IPAT (Impact) equation from previous postings, the "impact/GDP" was referred to as our core concern in manufacturing since if we can reduce the environmental impact per unit of product value to the customer we are on the road to improvement. Some disagree that GDP is a good measure of progress. Hence the alternate measures, like GNH.

For sure, a measure of happiness must be employment and reward for that employment - number 5 above. In addition, economic wellness, number 1 above, as well as related mental and physical wellness can be associated with quality employment. But how do we (or should we) factor this into our technology wedge discussion?

In the last posting the question was asked - if a company reduces the amount of machinery used in manufacturing and replaces that machinery with manual labor does that help? The response was typically academic - it's complicated. Clearly there are some products and processes that don't lend themselves to this "conversation." But, for assembly tasks, one might make the argument that more human labor (replacing automation) might produce the product using less energy and resources and, ultimately, making the product easier to disassemble at its end of life. And then we need to consider the quality of the labor (meaning is it dull and repetitive or intellectually stimulating and, for sure, is it free from danger or other safety issues.)

So, this long lead in is to set the stage for a discussion of the "energy of labor." This discussion is based on a paper we published some time ago and included in the recent thesis of the student co-author. The paper, titled "Energy Use per Worker-Hour: A Method of Evaluating the Contribution of Labor to Manufacturing Energy Use," was written by Teresa Zhang in my lab and presented at the 14th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering in 2007 and published in the proceedings of the conference "Advances in Life Cycle Engineering for Sustainable Manufacturing Businesses" edited by S. Takata (it's on Amazon!).

Energy is an important metric of environmental impact and manufacturing efficiency. We know that in life-cycle assessment (LCA) analyses, energy consumption as a key parameter that can dominate environmental impacts such as global warming potential, carcinogenic emissions, and acidification potential. Energy assessment is also effective as an indicator of manufacturing efficiency. As yield, manufacturing cycle efficiency, process capability, and other manufacturing performance metrics improve, energy use per unit output decreases accordingly.

The metric of energy use was popularized largely due to the work of Howard Odum, who has written numerous books on energy and environmental accounting since the 1970’s (for example, Odum, H. T., 1971, Environment, Power, and Society, Wiley-Interscience, New York). In a publication in 1996 (Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, Wiley, New York), he presented several methods of quantifying the energy use of labor, in terms of metabolic energy, national fuel share, national emergy share, and as a function of the level of education enjoyed by a worker. Others have also discussed the energy use of labor in the form of caloric content of food consumed. Calculated as such, the conclusion is that the energy contribution of human labor to energy use is negligible. But there is more to the story.

The methodology presented in this posting from the paper is related to economic input-output (EIO) LCA, in that both methods aim to quantify environmental impacts that may not be included in process-based LCA. Because both methods take a top-down approach, presenting averages for an industry or country, they do so without tremendously increasing the work of LCA practitioners.

Energy of labor and EIO-LCA should not be applied at the same level of analysis because many sources of energy use would be double counted. However, energy of labor can be very effective if incorporated into hybrid process-based EIO-LCA, as shown in the figure below, where EIO-LCA is used to assess activity upstream of the process-based analysis. The energy use of labor enriches the horizontal scope of process-based LCA, while EIO captures vertical supply chain impacts.

Schematic of process based LCA and energy of labor used in series with EIO LCA.

In addition to improving the accuracy of LCA, evaluating the energy of labor can be applied to extend the decision making capabilities of LCA. The energy of labor enables us to quantify and inform decisions that introduce or reduce the degree of automation, deal with the location of a plant, or involve labor intensive process steps.

We'll continue the discussion from here in Part 2 next time.

Resource Dieting 2.0

2011-04-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

Or, you are what you eat?

The discussion on reducing resource consumption along with energy and other consumables continues. We are moving, steadily, from 'should we' to 'how can we' and 'how much have we'? This in regards to reduction of impacts for a variety of industries.

Recent Environmental Leader articles tout advancements by an increasing number of major corporations in areas as varied as "commitment to sustainability" to "CO2 from transportation." In the former, sustainability, Unilever, was at the top of a poll of sustainability experts who were asked to identify companies who are "committed to sustainable development, seeing strategic advantage in pursuing policies and actions which go beyond the requirements of environmental and social legislation.” Other companies high on the poll include General Electric and Interface along with Walmart. Do you remember not too long ago when some of these companies, Walmart in particular, would not have been mentioned anywhere near this kind of improvement?

I take special interest in the "seeing strategic advantage in pursuing policies and actions which go beyond the requirements of environmental and social legislation" part. That's leadership and smart business practice.

In the latter example, CO2 emission, the reference is to Maersk Line and reduction in CO2 from its shipping operations. Only down 5% this last year but they are committed to reducing their CO2 emissions relative to a 2007 baseline (and that's before the big downturn) by 25 percent by 2020. One solution - a new class of ships that has 16 percent higher capacity but emit 50% less emissions than typical. That means less fuel for an equivalent tonnage transported. That's one way to reduce the impact per GDP. The Environmental Leader article mentions that they surveyed over 300 customers and found that a large percentage (41%) consider sustainable operation when selecting a carrier and, thus, Maersk, sees this as a competitive advantage.

Less is more - a great philosophy when going on a diet!

Reduced transportation impact help reduce the manufacturing phase impact if the product is heavily dependent on supply chains stretching out a long distance. And that helps move us towards the lower left corner in the use vs manufacturing impact chart.

Again from Environmental Leader (I'm a big fan - can't you tell?!) is another novel example of resource dieting. One of my students, Katie McKinstry, sent me a link to an article from yesterday on Ford Motor Company "turning carpets in to auto parts." The article gives some impressive statistics. It states that "Ford has recycled nearly 4.1 million pounds of carpet into cylinder head covers … [t]he Ford Escape, Fusion, Mustang and F-150 all use EcoLon, a nylon resin made from 100 percent recycled carpet." This, added to the use of soy foam seat cushions and recycled blue jeans for sound-dampening material, shows the potential of reuse of materials from the waste stream and, ultimately, reducing the consumption of virgin materials for these applications. Talk about dieting!

Looks like used carpet is going to be a hot item on the commodity market with Ford competing with carpet companies, like Interface and Shaw, for used carpet.

Finally, also on the theme of dieting, is the question of automation. Let me explain.

If a company reduces the amount of machinery used in manufacturing and replaces that machinery with manual labor does that help? It is complicated. Clearly there are some products and processes that don't lend themselves to this "conversation." But, for assembly tasks, one might make the argument that more human labor (replacing automation) might produce the product using less energy and resources and, ultimately, making the product easier to disassemble at its end of life.

Or not. We need to think about this.

Next posting we'll discuss the "energy of labor" based on a paper we published some time ago and the recent thesis of another one of my students.

Going on a resource diet

2011-03-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Or, less is more.

In a posting on February 17th of this year I was building an argument to try to place products in a space defined by the use vs make consumption or impact. This would allow us to consider products to consume that require both fewer resources to produce as well as fewer to consumer. And I argued that such products were closer to sustainable than others. Except for including it in the figure showing the contribution to lifetime impact in that posting, I did leave out the "post consumer" phase in the discussion. That should be an important consideration also.

We could add that easily. If you are a good visual thinker, you could imagine a third axis on the graph I showed in the February 17th posting representing End of Life Consumption or Impact. Then, by extension of the argument, products would fall into a "high" or "low" end of life impact based on whether they were essentially fully recyclable (or the materials were fully recovered, and extra points for avoiding downcycling) or not, respectively.

Again, living in the lower left quadrant (or cubic space if a three dimensional plot) is most desirable. Recall the Ricoh Comet circle diagram introduced early on in this blog (see the posting of September 21, 2009). In the circle, the forward (counterclockwise loop) is from materials manufacture through parts manufacture, product manufacturing, through sales to delivery and use. The reverse (clockwise loop at the bottom) is after the consumer is done with the product back through recycling, recovery, and return to material supply chain.

So, relative to the Comet circle, the "top half" is the manufacturing phase and the "bottom half" is the use phase. And, the shortest loops of the circle the extend from the consumer and back to the consumer are the most sustainable in the use phase.

So, what about the material diet?

In a follow-on posting to the use vs make chart and discussion I gave an example of Ditto hangers, made from post consumer recycled paper and cardboard fiber, as a product in the lower left hand corner of the chart. I don't know all the details about resources used to produce the hangers but I'm finding out.

The re-use of material reduces our appetite for new materials and, essentially, amortizes the initial environmental cost and impact of the first production of the material.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor on March 15th discusses Pepsi's plan to move to totally "plant based PET" bottle for packaging their beverage instead of the current oil-based plastic. They plan to start introducing this in 2012 in some markets and it could eventually result in "a switch of billions of bottles sold each year. Of Pepsi's 19 biggest brands, those that generate more than $1 billion in revenue, 11 are beverage brands that use PET." According to the article the bottle will be made from "switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business. One unique feature is that the input to the material is waste from other uses and not plant bio-matter grown specially for this purpose.

Again, as with the hangers, we'll need to see how much energy and resources go into converting the salad listed above into the bottle and, there is no mention of whether or not this particular bottle will be classified as compostable or recyclable.

Another candidate for the lower left corner?!

Now for something completely different (and apologies to Monty Python for borrowing the phrase!) but on the same subject. My friend at Cambridge University, Julian Allwood, just sent me the most recent white paper published from a project titled "WellMet 2050" which is, according to the website "investigating novel methods of meeting global carbon emissions targets for steel and aluminium that go beyond improving process efficiency by reconsidering the entire product lifecycle." This recent white paper is titled "Going on a metal diet" (and is available to download).

"Going on a metal diet" discusses means "to use less liquid metal to deliver the same services in order to save energy and carbon." I have referred to Professor Allwood's research on this in past postings. He has pointed out in several publications that just trying to recycle metals more efficiently (or more completely) will never allow us to reach the goals of energy and carbon reduction proposed by many governmental agencies and organizations.

In this latest white paper from WellMet, they report on two key strategies for reducing our intake of liquid metal: "designing products that use less metal and improving the ‘yield ratio’ of metals manufacturing." In this research they used five detailed case studies to examine metal intensive product design. These included: universal beams in construction, food cans, car bodies, reinforcing bars and deep sea oil and gas pipeline. All real products and large consumers of metal.

The research report states that "in each case, we found we could deliver the same final service with less metal, by pursuing one of four strategies: avoiding over-specification; selecting the best materials; optimising whole products; optimising individual components."

This is the recipe for eating well while on a diet - ala metals. Let's look closer:
- avoid overeating (that is use the correct size, thickness, strength of metal needed - not more; this usually relies on quality control to insure materials meet specifications; we've discussed this before. Recall the example of tightened tolerances on aerospace components saving weight?)
- choose the right food to eat (or, selecting the right materials; use analysis to get the right ratio of strength to weight, or stiffness to weight, etc. Using software like Granta designs material selection software can help.
- consider the whole meal and its overall balance of ingredients (or, optimizing whole product or system of production; we've covered this a lot in the past - thinking of the entire product life cycle)
- read the label on each food item in your meal and choose carefully (or optimize the individual components; recall the "Google earth" view of manufacturing? And we talked there about technology wedges to aid in this optimization. We identified a number of levels that can be analyzed or optimized and improvements can be applied to).

It all makes sense to me. This strategy can be applied to a broad range of materials - not just metals. These can act as the criteria for the creating the technology wedges that we propose to move our products and systems in the green direction.

Happy dieting!

Learning from big events

2011-03-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

Or avoiding an "environmental tsunami"

As I am writing this posting the world is watching the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Most concerning is the situation developing around some of the nuclear power centers in Japan where the potential of a disaster of Chernobylian proportions is a real possibility.

Without trying to assess "who did or did not do what and what they should or should not have anticipated," situations like this humble us (specially engineers and scientists) as to our abilities to "do the right thing" when designing and implementing technological solutions to aid society (and run our businesses).

My wife, with a solid letters and arts education from a top school (and hence a member of that great mass of folks who can pose questions that make make engineers look down at their shoes and mutter "ohh…uumm…well") often observes these events and makes a very perceptive comment. When an "even" occurs that is based on a situation that was never expected to occur, engineering experts are interviewed about this and the first response is "wow, we never expected that to happen." She points to the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco bay area in 1989 and the collapse of a portion of the bay bridge. This was exactly what the experts said. This is a true statement but, to many folks, an unsettling response. We should be able to do better. And next time the designs are improved of course.

But, there always seem to be more things that are not anticipated.

The world is full of "things we don't expect to happen." The Japanese earthquake was apparently a once in a millennium event with little or no evidence in history of a prior occurrence. One geologist interviewed on NPR said that we might have to look further back to anticipate potential large earthquakes in the future - for example, in California.

So, this makes us think (more) about a range of future concerns.

A faculty member in the Goldman School of Public Policy here at UC-Berkeley, David Kirp, has just published a book titled "Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children's Lives and America's Future" (see Amazon). Although this book deals with education and not nuclear energy or sustainability, one of the author's comments on page xiii of the preface of the book (which was also quoted on NPR the other morning) rang true to me for a much broader discussion on sustainability and green manufacturing.

Professor Kirp wrote, relative to educational systems, "the aim is to make widely available what all parents want for their children, to treat every youngster as well as we'd want our own children to be treated. That's the golden rule, and it's sound ethics, whatever your ideology. What's more, it's good for kids and a solid investment for the rest of us." Last time I checked, the golden rule concept is part of most major religious beliefs.

Doesn't this sum up our discussions on sustainability perfectly? Let's do for everyone else what we'd like to see those we love the most experience. Start with children and work our way up the humanity ladder - next to parents, then extended families, then neighbors, and villages, and countries, regions, etc.

I started this blog some time ago asking the question "why green manufacturing?" And I was very careful to indicate all the reasons this is a good idea for both "believers" and "non-believers" alike - meaning those convinced global warming is a fact or a real threat and those not sure about it or certain it is all hype. And one of the reasons for greening was to reduce risk. That includes natural risks. Does your supply chain pass near to Sendai?

But now we look at Japan.

No one saw this coming. And no one can tell for sure (meaning 100% certainty) if there is global warming or if it is caused by man made activity or just a periodic fluctuation in the earth's climate.

Do we really want to take that chance with our children, or, more likely grand and great-grand children? How do you do the cost-benefit analysis on that?

In the November 17th 2010 posting I referred to a discussion on a smart phone app that would send out hypothetical "text messages from the future." The example message then referred to a need to wear respirators due to past build up of CO2 emissions.

A more current message from the future might read "Please make sure not to build backup power generators for nuclear power stations in low areas. Mind the tsunami!"

We owe ourselves a more proactive view of the future, and how to insure it is unspoiled for our descendants. It starts with individual commitments, like green manufacturing and sustainable production, whatever your beliefs. And these commitments and the actions arising from them influence our associates, then our companies, then our country and our world.

Let's not get hit by an unexpected "environmental tsunami" which we could have had an effect on - by designing, producing and reusing products more sustainably

In the next posting we'll continue on this path of looking for more technology wedges, and ways to assess their impact, for enabling green manufacturing.

Moving to the lower left corner

2011-03-01T17:24:00.000-08:00

Achieving sustainable consumption and manufacturing

In the last posting we were discussing the "space" that manufacturing and use impacts occupy depending upon the product. I presented a graphic that outlined four areas of that space - from low manufacturing and use impact (lower left corner) to high impacts for both (upper right corner). The lower left corner was the location of products that could be considered more sustainable both from the production and use aspects. Hence the title of this posting.

The other two "high-low" quadrants then represented products where we need either to increase the efficiency of the product (with respect to design or using manufacturing leveraging) or we need to improve the efficiency of the manufacturing process relative to use and manufacturing phases, respectively.

So the obvious question is - what kind of product typifies the "low-low" quadrant?

One great example is hangers!

OK, I know some of you will snort that this is a typical academic example and does not relate to "real products" - like automobiles, toaster ovens or laptops, etc. I accept the criticism. But wait until you hear the argument (and see the example I've in mind) before totally disregarding this argument.

First, the set up.

Is there any more annoying "consumer product" than the wire hanger? They are absolutely necessary for keeping clothing stored and orderly (either in the store or in your closet or, it turns out, in shipping garments to the store) but hard to get rid of responsibly. They tangle easily, and recyclers hate them or have severe restrictions on their recycling since they are not easy to process, they are hard to store and transport and are usually coated with something.

Most say the best way to deal with hangers is to reuse them. What do you do with old hangers? They accumulate faster than you can use them!

I looked on line for help. According to the Montegomery County MD waste services, for wire hangers, they suggest (and the parenthetical comments are my observations!):

"Reuse- The best "disposal" method for wire hangers is reuse! Check with your local dry cleaners to see whether they accept wire hangers -- many do! (if you look behind the laundry at the end of the day you may see them in the trash; that's what I observed; it is a customer service but it is not recycling)

Recycling - Curbside blue bin program; Sorry, we do not accept wire hangers in our curbside blue bin program

Curbside scrap metal collection program- If you have a scrap metal collection scheduled for large metal items, you may add your hangers to the pile. We do not schedule scrap metal collections for hangers alone. (Next time you are throwing away the scrap steel in your backyard…toss the hangers in!)

Solid Waste Processing Facility and Transfer Station; We accept hangers in the scrap metal drop-off. Follow the signs to the Recycling area. (OK, this is better)

Trash- You may put wire hangers into your regular household trash." (but not recycling).

Enter Ditto hangers. They have developed a product for commercial and residential use - the paper hanger! The website says "The Ditto 10-Pack line is smart, hip and stylish, 100% non-toxic and recyclable anywhere! Strong and long lasting, the Ditto Paper Hanger can hold over 20 lbs, strong enough to hold the heaviest leather jacket or winter coat. Made with 100% tree-free recycled paper the Ditto Paper Hangers can fit twice the amount of clothing in the same closet space!" They are designed to replace the wire hangers (see issues with them above) or the polystyrene hangers that you bring home from the store (and that the clothing was shipped to the store in) and then can't recycle.

Now the sustainable part. Besides making the hangers from 100% recycled paper, they have a strategy for easy reuse or recycle of the hangers. Their website shows the traditional life cycle of a hanger (ending up in a landfill - apparently an estimated 8 billion hangers end up in landfills every year - that's 21 million a day!).

Ditto Hangers include a cartoon in their website under the "environment" tab that shows their product in use in a commercial setting with easy customer reuse/recycling.

This is compared to the traditional cycle of clothing shipped from manufacturer on hanger, item removed from shipping hanger and put on display hanger, and both landfilled when the product is sold. In the new system the "product is shipped and displayed on Ditto Hangers. Hangers can go home with customer for further branding power or can be recycled at the store with cardboard boxes." And, since it is cardboard, the customer can recycle it with their normal cardboard recycling.

The impact? Using 1 ton of Ditto hangers vs. polystyrene hangs saves, according to the website, 2,418 lbs of carbon, 17.44 barrels of oil (yes, plastic is made from oil!), and 121,129,281 BTU of energy.

To me, that puts this product squarely in the lower left corner.

But, what about more complex products? A recent Environmental Leader article (March 1, 2011) discusses the efforts of some major manufacturers and retailers in the apparel and footwear business working to inform customers of the environmental impact of their products. Called the "Apparel Index" this is designed to drive improvements in the whole supply chain as well as inform.

The goals include (from the article): improving water-use efficiency and/or re-use in cultivation or production of raw materials (e.g. cotton) and product manufacturing; Minimizing the volume and chemical constituents of water discharges associated with manufacturing; reducing the need for water use in garment care by challenging conventional washing practices and developing alternative approaches; minimizing direct and embedded energy use; creating products that mitigate other carbon impacts in society (such as reducing the need for heating and air conditioning systems); committing to minimizing operational, supply chain and end-of-life waste; developing effective uses for textile waste; and reducing the use of chemicals and potentially hazardous materials which pose health or environmental risks, both in cultivation and manufacturing.

They hope to substantially alter the "business as usual" model and the potential costs, impacts, and damage it can cause.

I don't have any specific examples of products but one of the prime drivers here, Nike, has its Environmental Apparel Design Tool for assisting its designers in making the right choices at the product design stage. And, this will move Nike products in the direction of the lower left corner of the diagram.

We will look at some additional efforts to drive products to the lower left corner including some major initiatives from US government agencies in the future.

And, finally, something you can do to help with the battle to get more understanding of global warming!

This was brought to my attention by one of my lab researchers, Dr. Barbara Linke. A new study has proved that "Being in a warm room can make the idea of global warming seem more likely." A study done by a Business school professor and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (described here) showed, among other things, that if people were asked about their impressions of global warming and its impacts when they were in a "heated cubicle", they were more likely to believe in global warming. The article also notes that "In another experiment, the researchers found that participants who were led to experience thirst by eating pretzels were more likely to agree that desertification and drought will increasingly threaten people’s ability to find fresh drinking water." The study comments that the results validate the finding that "people will judge a certain condition of the world as more likely if it fits with what they are experiencing at that moment."

What can I say? Eat your pretzels in a cool room if you want to avoid worrying about global warming!

Green Consumption and Green Manufacturing

2011-02-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

Or where does the (green) buck stop?

Recent postings have been discussing the connection between the use phase impact of a product and the manufacturing phase impact and what influences these. This was in the context of both looking at means to reduce consumption (meaning giving the consumer products that deliver the required functionality or service but at a lower environmental impact or energy/resource consumption.)

There are a number of places along the product development chain that critical decisions are made that have a positive or negative influence on this impact. Last time we were talking about whether or not the rule of thumb that 20% of the design influences 80% of the cost of a product also applies to the energy/resource impact. I thought that, in many cases, it didn't work that way.

There is, by the way, a great study on this from 1993 written by some MIT researchers (Karl Ulrich and Scott Pearson) titled "Does product design really determine 80% of manufacturing cost?" and they tease this comment apart with some case studies and analysis. The report attempts to determine how much product design influences the manufacturing cost of a product. They study this for a class of high-volume, electromechanical consumer products — automatic drip coffee makers - and they find "that for coffee makers, the variation in manufacturing costs attributable to differences in product design is slightly smaller in magnitude than the variation in costs attributable to differences in manufacturing systems, for a specific range of assumed manufacturing system parameters." They note that the "rule of thumb" is specially flawed where the dominant cost contributor is the cost of materials. Further, they note that "There is also a basic logical flaw in the argument that if the minimum possible manufacturing cost is 80% of the maximum possible manufacturing cost then product design is a critical activity of the firm. The flaw arises from the assumption that much of the 80% of the cost of the product is under the control of the product designers."

I was not going to get into that but I agree. But, for now, we are concerned with the influence of design vs manufacturing on the life time product energy or resource impact.

So, back to use vs manufacturing impacts. You might recall this discussion recall blogs ago. We can actually visualize this use vs mfg impact space in terms of what needs to be done depending on where the product sits in that space. In the figure below, we can see four quadrants of "sustainable product" characterization.

The axes are the same as in the use vs manufacturing discussion and indicate, from low to high, the consumption or impact of that phase of the product's life cycle. Then the "low-low" quadrant indicates the most sustainable product. The "high-high" quadrant contains products that are to be avoided or, in another sense, offer the most potential for improvement. The two "high-low" quadrants represent products where we need either to increase the efficiency of the product (with respect to design or using manufacturing leveraging) or we need to improve the efficiency of the manufacturing process relative to use and manufacturing phases, respectively.

This figure does not, however, discuss the relative importance of all the phases of the product life referring back to the earlier discussion about the role of design. I've tried to capture this in the figure below. The figure shows the contribution to lifetime impact or energy/resource use of the various phases of a product, from first concept through design and production to end of life.

First, please note that this is a conceptual drawing (even a cartoon) trying to represent reality. There are lots of examples where this likely does not represent real product performance. And, you might be able to adjust the location of the high and low parts of a particular pattern relative to the phase somewhat as well. But, having said that, we can identify at least four patterns of impact shown in the figure as A. B, C, and D.

Pattern A, in blue, is what I think is a typical impact cycle with the major contributions to impact coming in the manufacturing and use phases. Pattern B, in red, reflects design decisions that more aggressively affect product impact - things like inefficient use of energy based on design decisions/component selection, materials choice, etc. Pattern C, in yellow, reflects an introduced manufacturing process/system efficiency that reduces the manufacturing contribution but has little impact on the rest of the product performance. This might be due to a more efficient process chain for manufacturing.

Finally, pattern D, in green, represents an example of "leveraging" manufacturing. Here the assumption is that a more capable manufacturing process is introduced in the production plan that may consume more energy or resource in itself but offers product advantages in that it improves the performance of the product over its lifetime. The example given in an earlier posting about improvements in automobile engine efficiency due to aggressive use of precision manufacturing is in this category.

An important point to note is that it is the area under the curve that is the cumulative impact of the product - basically the product of impact x time. Meaning, Pattern D is the best in this example since the area under the line representing that pattern is the smallest of all the examples. The worst case illustrated here, in terms of cumulative impact, is pattern B - poor design decisions.

It is possible to have improved manufacturing offset, somewhat, poor design. Pattern C does that to some extent.

Think about these two figures and the decisions that can be made along the product phase from design through end of life that will have an effect on where the product is located in the use vs manufacturing space. There is a lot of potential for reducing the impact of the product.

And, you can tell from the way I've composed these examples that I come from the manufacturing side of the engineering profession! I don't mean to "dis" my design friends in any way. I just want to make sure we are all aware of the tremendous potential manufacturing offers to address the sustainable consumption challenge.

We will continue to work on these "potentials" more in the future.

Everyone wants a label

2011-02-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

More on sustainable consumption

Last time we started to introduce the issues around sustainable consumption - from a manufacturing perspective. I know this sounds a bit strange, consumption from a production viewpoint, but the idea was motivated by the need to reduce the demand for un-necessary products (or, at least, to minimize the waste created by their consumption) and how manufacturing might play a role in this.

In the impact equation (also called IPAT) the demand is driven by population and consumption per unit of population (usually referred to as GDP/capita). It is this piece that, if reduced, would have a big effect on the overall societal impact on the environment - make consumption more sustainable (or, at least, less impactful).

Previously we discussed how manufacturing helps with the Impact/GDP piece of the impact equation - meaning, manufacturing provides the where-with-all to reduce that piece.

It is not a simple task - but ideas are emerging.

A recent International Herald Tribune article (29-30 Jan 2011) had a page of coverage about the World Economic Forum at Davos and talked about wind energy company Vesta and the wind energy association introducing a special label for products made with wind energy. The label is being promoted by a consortium of international organizations and companies interested in promoting the use of clean energy and they've come up with a symbol, consisting of three blue "swooshes" around the word “WindMade,” as their way of promoting products made with clean energy.

Companies are seeing a slow down in the movement towards reducing climate change due to the economic downturn, new political realities and questioning about the urgency. So, some groups and companies are picking up the torch themselves.

The idea is that if the consumer sees that the product was made with renewable energy they are more likely to purchase it - it aligns with their personal commitments to sustainability, etc.

Never mind that in the last posting I quoted the study by Enviromedia about the current 350 different labels that already confuse the consumer.

But this one, wind energy produced, has the potential to take root. The promoters also indicated there could be labels for other sorts of energy sources for producing the product as well, hydro, bio-fuel, solar, compost methane, etc.

The question is, to rephrase the comment from Professor Lanza in the last posting, do we want to encourage people to buy products they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like and that are made with energy that is better used somewhere else (or not at all)!?

This is the quandary … if you have a renewable source of energy should you be able to "waste it" and still claim to be advancing the cause?

Now, certainly, all the products made with renewable energy are not wasteful and un-necessary - not by a long shot. But it is the mentality that is potentially problematic.

So, how about a label for products made with "green manufacturing" technology (hopefully powered by renewable energy)? Why can't we have a label to represent products that are made with the minimum expenditure of resources (materials, water, other consumables), energy and with benign or, better, positive social impact to the folks making the products? And produced on systems that optimize both production efficiency and energy and resource utilization as discussed in the last posting.

I don't have a specific proposed label here. But we could call it "GreenMade" perhaps.

If you have some ideas send me a sketch! I'll include some of the better ideas in the blog in the future! Maybe a factory made of green leaves? Or a smokestack blowing smiley faces? Go for it!

And what about product design? It is often stated that design is 20% of the product development cycle but fixes 80% of the cost (see, for example, the article by David Anderson for a reasonable summary of this). The implication is that decisions made early in the concept and design phase for a product will dictate features/requirements that will control 80% of the lifetime product cost. The logic then follows then that it is difficult, if not impossible, for manufacturing to reduce costs since "design determines manufacturability" thus locking in costs.

But this does not necessarily translate to fixing 80% of the energy consumption (or other material/resource consumption). Let me explain.

Manufacturing processes differ in terms of their abilities, and efficiencies, to create functional products or components from raw materials. That is, transforming materials from one form to another - the definition of manufacturing - can be done in many ways. Even for the same design.

Further, the energy a product uses may depend a lot, or only minimally, on design decisions. For example, a designer may pick components for use in the product - say an electronic device -that individually consume a lot, or little, energy and together make the product function. That would count for a design driven energy product profile. Choosing correctly at the design phase would reduce product lifecycle impact.

But, there are many situations where this link doesn't work.

Going back to our "leveraging" discussion some postings ago we saw some examples of manufacturing enabling a design (which was not specifically dictating a process chain to produce the component) that had a tremendous effect on reducing the lifetime consumption, and impact, of the product. In that case the example was an automotive engine.

So, I think we can "decouple" design from manufacturing in many cases in term of energy or resource impact over product lifecycle and consider manufacturing an "independent" variable when it comes to determining life time product impact.

How we do that is a subject for additional discussion - let's continue this next time!

Sustainable consumption

2011-01-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

I am writing this from a technical meeting in Europe I've been attending on manufacturing where the flames of green manufacturing have been flamed and are burning brightly! A separate session on energy efficiency and resource effectiveness saw a group of presentations ranging from more detailed analysis of energy use patterns in production processes (think machining or heat treatment) to more esoteric issues of process planning with energy utilization in mind.

The process planning discussion was interesting. If you are familiar with process planning you already know the complexity of just trying to make sure all machines are used to the fullest extent. Process planning is, basically, how to order the production steps of a product through a number of machines. It includes how this is optimized to handle the production of a number of different parts (that is, several different sets of parts moving a number of production stations in a sequence - each set of different parts with a different quantity (called batch size)).

Think of the cartoons of production processes shown before here - a series of boxes linked by transfer mechanisms to move a workpiece from process (box) to process in a sequence. Now think of how a batch of parts of the same component move through this. The first part starts in the first box where an operation takes place for a set time. Then the part moves to the second box for a second operation and another similar part starts in the first box. With each "cycle" the parts move from box to box until the first part in the batch exits the final box and it is called a "finished product." Over time, all the parts in the batch move through the production line and the line "falls silent" as the last part moves through the system.

The "falling silent" part is the issue here.

When the next batch of parts (of a different component requiring different times at each of the boxes due to the operations that are needed) starts the production line, the planner has to allow enough time between batches so that the second batch does not "run into" the batch that precedes it. This occurs when the cycle time of some of the boxes is shorter for the second product than for the first one. That is, for a given process applied to a given part, it may require different times to complete the work on a part based on the requirements of the part. And the requirements will change from batch to batch for the parts in the production line.

Further, in such a production line there is always one process that takes longer than the others (called the "bottleneck"). Then, the time in the other steps following the completion of the tasks in that box while waiting for the bottleneck to complete its work is referred to as idle time. The bottleneck may occur at a different station for each batch of parts.

Still with me?

Now, recall the discussion we had in a previous posting on "green at the process level". This identified machines that used energy pretty much independently of the process that was being performed (referred to as "tare heavy") as opposed to machines that used little energy except when performing productive work ("process heavy"). If the production line described above has a lot of stations waiting for a part to appear in order to operate on the part, and the process in the station is "tare heavy", then a poorly planned production process chain will waste a lot of energy while not doing anything productive. Not a desirable situation.

It turns out that a lot of manufacturing processes fall into this category unfortunately for a variety of reasons we won't go into yet.

So, back to the meeting, if one can include in the process planning the consideration of not only delay times (or idle times) in the sequence of starting batches of products (with varying cycle time requirements) but the energy value of that wasted time (do to the machine energy use even if not processing - which will vary from process/machine to process/machine (or box to box in this example), then one could try to find a sequence of production of several batches of products that would insure both minimum production time (or makespan - the time difference between start and finish of a sequence of jobs) and minimum energy used.

This is an industrial engineer's dream problem (and a nightmare to solve).

But, for an existing production facility, for which the processes are well characterized from the energy perspective, this is a realistic goal. A presentation at the meeting by Professor John Sutherland of Purdue University went into some of the details. We can discuss this more at a later time.

So, what about the consumption title of this posting?

At the meeting, following this (and several other) interesting presentations, a discussion started about how if we could just get people to buy more sustainable products, we could produce less overall, and manufacturing would be reduced (although the value of manufactured products would likely be the same or greater) and this would be a better solution than trying to squeeze wasted energy (or other resources) out of the manufacturing process.

Or as Professor Gisela Lanza of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology put it to me - we need to encourage people not to buy products they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like!

The assembled engineers quickly agreed that we are not into "social engineering" and that this "behavior change" is better left to experts (rock stars, politicians, marketing consultants, other bloggers, etc.)

But, trying to improve the longevity of products by design and manufacturing is something we can aspire to. And maybe the people will follow.

I am encouraged by the fact that Americans seem to be looking for help to do this. Unfortunately they are not getting much assistance from the market place. A recent article posted by Enviromedia commenting on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) closing its public comment period for its Green Guides states that research that shows 65 percent of Americans would prefer just one seal for green products over the hundreds that are now causing confusion. They note that it is increasingly hard to determine if a product is "truly green" or not based on available information. They are presently overwhelmed with the 350 product certifications that currently exist.

So, the consumer may come around.

In the meantime, there is much to be done to reduce the impact of manufacturing on the individual process level (and to reduce tare consumption). This relies on such planning schemes as discussed above. If you have sufficient time between products coming into each box you may actually be able to shut off the process/machine (or essentially put to sleep major components) when the processing is done for that part. Then, if you can restart and warm up the process/machine before the next product appears at that station (box), to some extent you can "decouple" (a word engineers like to use to mean separate the effect of one thing on the other) the energy optimization problem from the wasted time problem.

And, of course, we can always try to reduce the tare consumption by design of the machine and its control and operation.

We are going to talk more about design and energy efficiency and longevity in the next posting - also motivated by discussions at this meeting.

"Resolution motivators" for the New Year

2011-01-14T00:22:00.000-08:00

Thoughts about green New Year's resolutions

With the turn of the calendar announcing a new year I remembered, as a kid, the flurry of activity in my house around the development and pronouncement of New Year's resolutions - those idealized goals for the next year which, if watched but not too closely, made the start of a new year enjoyable.

So I was thinking about this while reviewing a lot of material in preparation for this posting. And, it occurred to me, there are "resolution motivators" that we can use to help each of us craft our resolutions with respect to sustainability and green manufacturing for 2011.

So, here goes.

In no particular order, my top 10 "motivators" are:

1- "You snooze … you loose": The standard phrase employed when someone is not keeping their eye on the ball and gets bested, scooped, left behind or otherwise trumped by someone else. Think large lethargic corporations comfortable in their business practices while their competitors watch the trends and changes and respond resulting in increased profitability, market share and, at least, continuity in business. Reading any of the sources of green technology and business practices shows us that our competitors are not sleeting. Stay competitively awake.

2- Avoid "technical dickies": Definition - when I was in high school there was a "dickie craze." Dickies are faux turtleneck sweater necks (and a bit of shoulder) that you can wear under a shirt to give the appearance that you are wearing a full turtleneck sweater. They are the sweater equivalent to the clip on tie. Whereas they may appear to fool some … they eventually are apparent for what they are (a fake item). Green washing is, to me, the equivalent of a "technical dickie" - something that is not what it appears to be and only fools other "dickie" wearers. Don't green wash. (If you are not familiar with the greenwashing term see the July 10, 2009 posting)

3- "Every one wants to drink milk … but no one wants to milk the cows": This is a saying I got from my old friend Professor Dick DeVor of the University of Illinois. And he got it from his late father-in-law, farmer Herb Luedtke. Country wisdom. We all have to put something in to get something out. That is the reason for the social element of the triple bottom line of sustainability and, frankly, just common decency and good sense. A corollary to this is the familiar "no such thing as a free lunch."

4- The golden rule - "them with the gold makes the rules"; This was a well worn saying of one of my old, now departed, Berkeley colleagues Joe Frisch. It can actually be a positive concept. Consider Walmart (or any other very large corporation with a lot of sway over their suppliers). Walmart has embarked on a mission to green up their supply chain. Working with the Sustainability Consortium at Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas they are using their marketing leverage to drive the creation of eco labels for products sold in their stores so consumers can make decisions about what to buy. And they've been proactive about reducing packaging waste. Using your leverage to make things happen.

5- "Why worry about future generations? What have they ever done for us?" Attributed to Groucho Marx. This is the mantra of the "me generation" and has contributed to much of the situation we find ourselves in today. Sustainability, as we have discussed many times, is insuring the future has the same, or better, opportunities that we have. Same opportunities for education, life style, health, freedom, leisure, employment, nourishment and so on. Tall order. But that's what this is all about.

6- "Lead, follow or get out of the way": (and see number 1 above). There is probably nothing more frustrating about someone who is intellectually, or competitively, asleep than if, also, they are blocking your way. I had a friend who used to refer to a mythical "intellectual hat pin" (another relic from the past) that they would employ to poke someone to get someone to start taking some action or, at least, wake up and get out of the way. Leaders have special responsibilities (see numbers 1, 2 and 5 above). Maintaining an open and responsive attitude towards new drivers for reducing impacts in their operations and enterprises is at the top. And then taking action is next.

7- "Live life like a pizza … one slice at a time": I never quite understood this one but it is on a billboard along Interstate 80 outside of Dixon Ca advertising an Italian restaurant. I have other versions of "living life like a pizza" but won't bore you with those. This reminds me of technology wedges. These tech wedges (see September 15, 2009 blog) if this does not ring a bell) are designed to make small, but measurable, reductions in impact or consumption in a process or system. Rather than trying to eat the whole pizza in one bite, take small slices and make measurable, but consistent, progress.

8- "You cut and I pick": This has to be one of every mother's standard instructions in the face of siblings trying to divide like a pie or donut or something else they'd both rather eat all of. One slices and the other then gets first pick of their piece of the pie, or whatever. This insures that the "divider" will do their best to cut the item as close to equal in half as theoretically possible to insure the "chooser" gets a fair shake. Or, unless the chooser is asleep, the divider loses out. Be fair in your appraisal of any new concept or idea … just as if you were the divider.

9- "This will come in handy if we never use it": This was a phrase often employed by my father, reflecting his depression era "save it" mentality when any item or object came up for disposal but it seemed to have some inherent value or usefulness. He was not a hoarder by any means. But he did know how to get the most out of anything. The "low hanging" (if you will) energy or resources in any factory or facility ripe for saving/reducing/reusing is usually very large indeed. Find it and save it. As Ben Franklin would have said "A kilowatt saved is a kilowatt earned."

And, finally

10- Don't rely on the "magic 8 ball" or similar schemes for your planning. Read, think, ask, try. There are a lot of resources out there, specially now on the web, put together by folks who spend a lot of time scouring the world looking for innovation, examples, etc. - read them! Some of these sources are listed at the bottom of this page. Google search is an amazing tool. But read, think/analyze, then act.

Thanks for reading along. I hope this provide some stimulation for your resolutions this year.

And, Happy New Year!

Humbug?!

2010-12-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

Or, considering our future

One of the things that forms part of our holiday routine is watching the Alastair Sim's version of Dicken's classic "Christmas Story" (see You Tube). Scrooge (the character Sims plays) is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve (in his dreams) who show him the errors of his past, present and potential errors of his future if he doesn't "wise up" to the value of looking out for others. Scrooge, as you may recall, is a wealthy self-centered business man who was representative of some folks in Dicken's time in London in the 1850's. As a result of his spirit interactions Scrooge comes around to the betterment of all he comes into contact with (specially his clerk Bob Cratchit and his lame little boy 'Tiny Tim') and doesn't really lose much as the cost is not large compared to the benefits in his generosity and kindness.

I've often thought about how this movie might be remade with the concept of a sustainable world and the impacts individuals and companies make on all around them and their environment. Corporate sustainability reports are one way in which companies try to show, as Scrooge did, that they "get it" and it is not too late to embrace this bigger view of the world.

Lester Brown compares the change in thinking needed to that akin to the notion that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around - he is called "an environmental Paul Revere" (see Wikipedia). He notes that we used to consider the environment as part of the economy but it is really that the economy is part of the environment. Wikipedia quotes him from a speech in 2008 stating ' "indirect costs are shaping our future,' and by ignoring these, "we're doing exactly the same thing as Enron- leaving costs off the books. Consuming today with no concern for tomorrow is not a winning philosophy."

He could very well be one of the spirits of the future to visit our modern day Scrooge.

Other "spirits" include Paul Hawken (and his book The Ecology of Commerce, Collins, 1993 - a book I assign for reading in my sustainable manufacturing class). He gives (p. 139 of that book) as a definition of sustainability "an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations...your business must deliver clothing, objects, food or services to the customer in a way that reduces consumption, energy use, distribution costs, economic concentration,soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and other forms of environmental damage. Leave the world better than you found it."

Our modern day Scrooge wakes up to realize that if you are NOT presently at a sustainable state … then you need to meet the demands of today without compromising our ability to meet the demands of the future by reducing the environmental load/unit of commerce to offset any increase in unit production so as to achieve a sustainable state over time.

If you are presently at a sustainable state…then you can meet the demands of today without compromising our ability to meet the demands of the future. This is a net zero impact.

That is, in the words of Hawken, your business must deliver clothing, objects, food or services to the customer in a way that reduces consumption, energy use, distribution costs, economic concentration, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and other forms of environmental damage at a rate greater than the normal growth in consumption would require. Business must have a “net positive impact.”

That is a challenge to do while staying profitable but, as we've seen in postings in the past, not impossible and the tools to help do this, specially with respect to manufacturing, are growing in number and capability. Our so-called technology wedges are one set of tools.

Hawken and Lovins, in Natural Capitalism (Little Brown, 1999, another book I assign for class reading) state in the preface p x-xi. “The best solutions are based not on tradeoffs or “balance” between these objectives [economic, environmental and social policy] but on design integration achieving all of them together - at every level, from technical devices to production systems to companies to economic sectors to entire cities and societies.”

They go on to state that, ala Scrooge and his spirit visitors, “Without a fundamental rethinking of the structure and the reward system of commerce, narrowly focused eco-efficiency could be a disaster for the environment by overwhelming resource savings with even larger growth in production of the wrong materials, in the wrong place, at the wrong scale, and delivered using the wrong business models.”

That's what we've been talking about.

One way to "rethink the structure and reward system of commerce" to bring the external costs firmly into play is cap and trade.

As I heard on NPR the other morning while going to my office on campus "the whole world is watching California."

This is part of the 2006 Climate Law, called AB32, designed to give companies who generate large volumes of green house gases the "incentive" to emit fewer of those. And, interestingly, this is designed to move from impacting the big emitter, like oil refineries and some factories, "downstream" to the consumers of the products of those industries. Like me driving my car if it uses gasoline from a refinery that emits green house gas in this fuel production.

Which means I'll pay for this. Which means, I expect, I'll have even more incentive to look for vehicles that have improved performance in fuel economy or use none at all (but power companies are also on the list so be careful - who is most efficient in creating energy with least impact will be the question?! Remember the "impact equation"? Impact/GDP - this is it in practice!). This will impact automakers and many others in the supply chain as well.

And, although some take issue with this, the impact on the economy of California (eighth largest in the world if California was considered an independent country) is expected to encourage job growth and technology development.

More to come on this next time.

For now, my best to you for the holidays and a happy new year to all or, as Tiny Tim says, "God bless us every one!"

Tools for assessing impact

2010-12-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

Or, are we "doing the right thing?"

The last couple of postings have focussed on how to insure we can measure, and then take credit for (or get some credit for) changes made in a process that create a positive impact in terms of life-cycle impact or consumption.

This came up with reference to a discussion on net present value (or NPV) which is a way to estimate the the degree to which an improvement today leverages benefits into the future. The goal is to identify investments that can be leveraged in the future for big returns.

This brings up the question - what are some methodologies for making these assessments? In earlier postings (very early, in fact, see August, 2009 posting) we discussed rates of return for reductions in green house gas emissions, or water use, or energy use. But, how can we identify where to apply technologies (and, more importantly, what technologies to apply) for driving these reductions?

And - apologies in advance - I've been slow to get this posting ready due to end of the year academic activities and this will be along one!

One neat technique that came to our attention for meeting this challenge is called a "pinch analysis." (see wikipedia for a good description). This came up in a recent project we were doing for a major European automotive manufacturer and the very energy intensive process they were using to clean precision components (including engine blocks and heads) after production to remove contaminants. These contaminants could lead to assembly problems and performance issues in use.

First let's look at what pinch analysis is, then the process we applied it to and then the results. (And put your thinking cap on as this will get technical fast!)

Wikipedia describes a pinch analysis as "a methodology for minimizing energy consumption" that was originally developed for the chemical industry. Wiki includes this nice summary of the technique -

"… process data is represented as a set of energy flows, or streams, as a function of heat load (kW) against temperature (deg C). These data are combined for all the streams in the plant to give composite curves, one for all hot streams (releasing heat) and one for all cold streams (requiring heat). The point of closest approach between the hot and cold composite curves is the pinch temperature (pinch point or just pinch), and is where design is most constrained. Hence, by finding this point and starting design there, the energy targets can be achieved using heat exchangers to recover heat between hot and cold streams. In practice, during the pinch analysis, cross-pinch exchanges of heat are [often] found between a stream with its temperature above the pinch and one below the pinch. Removal of those exchanges by alternative matching makes the process reach its energy target."

This example comes from the MS Thesis of Mr. Saurabh Garg, titled "Solid Particle Contaminant Cleaning in the Automotive Industry", and done in my lab at Berkeley in Spring 2010. The motivation for this project was the large amount of energy consumed by the cleaning process that is not only a production cost constraint for the automotive industry in the wake of ever increasing energy prices, but also leads to a significant environmental footprint in terms of indirect greenhouse gas emissions. Garg noted that the severity of this impact depends on the energy mix of the geographical area and the impact created by the sources of energy production.

The objectives of the work that form the basis of applying the pinch analysis were:

- characterize various fluid flows in the process and in external circuits in terms of important parameters such as steady state flow rates, and temperature
- optimize the energy flows in the system to ensure maximum process-to-process heat recovery potential
- propose distribution of the net load on external utilities to minimize the overall heating and cooling costs, and
- analyze and compare the energy requirements of a standalone system of cleaning machines vs. that of centrally heated and cooled machines in a manufacturing assembly line.

So we are dealing with flows of fluids at different temperatures - a relatively common process characteristic in manufacturing (think painting, heat treating, washing, etc.) Not surprisingly, this will involve some simple thermodynamics.

The basic concept of a pinch analysis (as defined above) is represented by the diagram below, showing the temperature - enthalpy rate for a process stream in manufacturing. If you need some brush up on your thermodynamics, check the wikipedia discussion on enthalpy. Enthalpy is, basically, the measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system. Wikipedia explains that since "the total enthalpy, H, of a system cannot be measured directly … change in enthalpy, ΔH, is a more useful quantity than its absolute value. The change ΔH is positive in endothermic reactions, and negative in exothermic processes. ΔH of a system is equal to the sum of non-mechanical work done on it and the heat supplied to it." The figure below summarizes the basis of the analysis.

The analysis starts by representing all the process streams in the domain of analysis on a temperature-enthalpy rate (T- ΔH) diagram where the vertical (y) axis represents the temperature scale while the horizontal (x) axis represents enthalpy rate. Each process stream is represented by a straight line on this diagram running from the stream inlet temperature (Tin) to the stream target temperature (Tout). For a process with a series of process streams that comprise the whole operation, you make one straight line for each stream in the series. The term ΔT stands for the difference between two temperatures.

Since any horizontal distance on the x-axis represents a difference of enthalpies in which we are interested, the absolute values on the x-axis are insignificant. It is precisely for this reason that the composite curves can be translated horizontally on a T-ΔH diagram, without affecting the process stream. The slope of any line representing a process stream on a T-ΔH diagram is given by 1/(mass flow rate x Cp). Here Cp is the specific heat of the fluid.

For heat exchange to occur, the hot stream cooling curve (hot composite curve) must lie above the cold stream heating curve. (cold composite curve). Because of the ‘kinked’ nature of the composite curves, they approach each other most closely at one point defined as the minimum approach temperature (ΔTmin). The point of minimum temperature difference represents a bottleneck in heat recovery and is commonly referred to as “pinch” as defined earlier by the Wikipedia reference. The area of overlap between the composite curves represents the potential for process-to-process heat recovery. As stated before, horizontal translation of the curves will vary ΔTmin such that at one particular value, the overlap shows the maximum possible scope for heat recovery within the process. At this value the requirement for external hot and cold utilities, as represented by the hot and cold end overshoots of the composite curves, is minimum. However, the maximum process recovery is only a theoretical concept and practical design challenges and cost considerations limit this value as illustrated below.

As seen in the figure, external energy costs increase linearly as the ΔTmin increases. This is because at low temperature difference, the energy transfer process is more efficient and the in-process energy recovery potential is high because the hot and cold composite curves align nicely with each other. In other words, the potential for energy recovery decreases as the composite curves move apart (increasing ΔTmin).

Ok, so how was this used in the automotive cleaning example? The T-ΔH diagram depicting the hot and cold composite curves for the existing cleaning process (flows of hot and cold fluids at various temperatures) is shown in the figure below. Temperature is along the vertical axis (degrees C) and enthalpy (in kW) is along the horizontal axis. The figure was constructed following the procedure described above (and you may need to 'click' on the figure to see all the detail.)

The figure shows that there is a good potential for energy recovery through process-to-process heat exchange, as shown by the green shaded region. The pinch, in this case, is defined by an extended region and not a single position, having a minimum temperature difference of 3 degrees C.

The next step is to propose solutions to "recover" this energy and evaluate whether or not they are feasible economically and, also, what the potential environmental impact will be. A suitable heat exchanger was determined based on the area of heat exchange needed to accomplish the energy recovery. Then, using an economic analysis the potential return of the investment was determined. The figure below compares the total annual energy costs (based on heating and cooling alone) for the proposed retrofit design of the cleaning process based on an improved process-to process

heat exchange optimization vs. the current costs based on the existing design of the process. It can be seen from the figure that beyond the initial 3 years when the capital cost will be completely paid, the net difference between the operational energy costs of pinch-optimized retrofit design and the existing design is worth a savings of 84,500 Euros annually.

Further analysis resulting in considering adding a heat pump to recover some energy due to changes in fluid pressures also. That was good for another 20,000 euro savings annually after the payoff (3 years).

Finally, what about the environmental payback?

Garg includes this analysis as well. The use phase emissions for the existing cleaning process can be attributed directly to the impact created by the consumption of process electricity, and the heating and cooling energy. The total impact for each of these three forms of energy consumption can be calculated by simply multiplying the total energy requirement in each case, with a conversion factor that expresses the impact (kg CO2) per unit kWh based on the source and quality of that energy generation. For example, for a unit (kWh) electricity consumption, the corresponding GWP impact is roughly 0.649 kg CO2 equivalent based on the energy mix of Germany where this facility is located. The same is true for cooling energy, as the cooling is achieved through a refrigeration cycle that involves electricity consumption. For the heating, high temperature steam is used, whose production is linked to an equivalent impact of 0.204 kg CO2 eq./kWh.

Based on the above numbers, the use phase impact generated by the existing cleaning process is found to be 2335 MT CO2 per year. Because of the reduced energy consumption due to pinch optimization, the net impact due to the optimized process is much lower, about 1388 MT CO2 eq. per year - a "savings" of almost 1000 MT CO2 eq. per year!

However, the capital investment in the form of heat exchanger devices will also cause a one-time (fixed) impact, which can be evaluated using, for example, an Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIOLCA) database (e.g. from Carnegie Mellon University). The EIO-LCA analysis for the heat exchanger was used for the given application and predicted an impact of 100 MT CO2 eq. So that is the "embedded" impact of the proposed switch and any improvement needs to be greater than that at the minimum.

Since the reduced impact, almost 1000 MT CO2 eq. per year, is substantially greater than the one time 100 MT CO2 eq. hit due to the production and installation of the heat exchanger we can safely say the GHG return on this investment is pretty good!

There is even better news. This is one cleaning station of dozens in this large automotive facility and, perhaps, hundreds throughout the company. The potential for larger impacts as more are retrofitted, with the same economic and environmental impacts, is tremendous. Talk about a great technology wedge!

And you can use this in your net present value evaluation also.

I'll let you chew on this long and detailed discussion a bit! But, the point is that there are a lot of existing tools out there that, carefully applied with solid engineering logic, can make a big impact on both bottom lines - cost and environment.

Leveraging all your resources

2010-11-17T23:13:00.000-08:00

Future planning/future rewards

A number of items passing across my computer screen (or my ears from the radio) have prompted an additional posting on "leveraging" following our last blog on leveraging manufacturing.

These are, in no particular order, the continuing development of the Chinese high speed rail network (as reported on NPR the other morning), recent e-mails among a few "green friends" on the need for, and feasibility of, inclusion of influences other than economic terms in net present value (NPV) calculations, and a discussion I had recently with some "design" folks at a meeting on how a major company can include green manufacturing "awareness" in its products and get some recognition of this from the consumer.

These sound unrelated - but, I will now try to string them together! And apologies in advance if this sounds like rambling to you.

Let me start with the NPV discussion. This came up due to an article in a trade press basically stating that, since "green technologies" really only have positive net present value due to subsidies they cannot really drive economic recovery or create "high value jobs." This was presented as part of a discussion as to why we will be better off without cap and trade.

So, first, what is NPV? Referring to our old friend, Wikipedia, net present value is "simply the present value of future cash flows minus the purchase price." It is a means to take expected future cash flows from an investment, usually a series of expected cash inputs over time, and convert them to an equivalent sum (present value, PV, or present worth, PW) based on an assumed interest rate or growth rate over the time of the future flows. Sort of, if you had this amount today (present value), and invested it over the same time period, it is the accumulation of value you'd realize over the amount started with.

If the NPV is greater than zero, the investment will yield positive results and may be worth the risk of investing. As Wikipedia says, "NPV is an indicator of how much value an investment or project adds to the firm." The assumption is, then, that if the NPV is zero, or less, the investment is not worth it.

So, now we throw in environmental considerations, or carbon footprint, or some other metric of impact or consumption, These are hard to monetize so the impact of these potential "rewards" cannot be easily determined. So, some say, we should not consider them in our calculations of investment and only go with those costs that can be solidly determined.

So, since we cannot estimate the "value" of reducing the carbon footprint of our process, or product, we cannot really determine whether the NPV of any investment which has the effect of reducing the carbon footprint is worth it. And, this brings cap and trade into the cross hairs. Cap and trade is a market-based approach that uses economic incentives to drive pollution reduction by steadily reducing the allowable amount of pollution that can be emitted. The idea is that if you are successful in reducing pollution below your allowable level, you can "sell" your excess allowance to someone else who has not yet been able to reduce their pollution.

And this is, to some, an artificial subsidy to some technologies that reduce pollution that cannot be justified by a reasonable economic analysis, like NPV.

The challenge is, can you include environmental metrics into NPV?

This was originally brought to my attention by Ralph Resnick of NCDMM in a note to a few of us asking whether or not we could include sustainability metrics in NPV. One response from John Sutherland, a professor at Purdue University and a leader in green manufacturing, referred to a great article in Forbes from June 2009 on "Calculating the true cost of carbon" by David Serchuck. This article offers a balanced and rational (to me!) explanation of carbon cost evaluation and the value of carbon taxes in an economy to drive CO2 reduction and technology. And the article puts an average price of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide.

The real question is - how do you value risk? And, then, how do you figure this in your NPV calculation?

Most folks I talk with, over a wide range of companies, see the potential risks associated with driving full speed off the "business as usual cliff" as real. Recall our recent discussions about water, rare earth metals, etc. This is all part of the equation. What is it worth to you to be able to reduce your carbon footprint and is the investment needed to do this worth it?

One common proxy for carbon is electricity (or rather one common proxy for electricity is carbon!). You can calculate the cost of electricity. You can determine the impact of your use based on where you are and the mix of fuels used by your local utility. So, we can use that for NPV.

You can estimate the impact of regulation on the cost of your product if we expect some areas of the world (and California) to start to track the carbon footprint of your product and, maybe (probably) tax you for excessive carbon use. This already occurs in France when you buy a car that has a gCO2 equivalent/kilometer travelled value less than a prescribed level. So, I can use that in my NPV for transportation.

There are probably more. We'll work on it.

NPV is a way to estimate the impact of future benefits in today's terms. Or, put another way, the degree to which an improvement today leverages benefits in the future.

So, what about the Chinese trains? The NPR program talked about a new high speed train that cut the travel time from Shanghai to Wuhan to just 4 hours. It used to take 10 hours. Wuhan is a rural area with lower costs of operation (by 50%) than in Shanghai nearer to the coast. Companies are moving there now (and these are international companies) due to the supply of labor, lower costs of operation (like living expenses for employees and, yes, local incentives) but accessibility due to the train. And they mentioned the investment in high speed train networks in China which will create a high speed rail network with more kilometers of track than the systems of the rest of the world combined.

And in US, some recently elected governors are refusing to accept Federal stimulus funding to build high speed high speed rail networks in their states.

In another e-mail exchange on some common research collaboration on energy efficiency and resource effectiveness we had a go around on the meaning of terms. John Sutherland made a simple definition that is worth sharing - "In lay language, efficiency is "doing things right," and effectiveness is "doing the right things."

That's a great way of looking at investments that can be leveraged in the future for big returns - like high speed rail for example with big returns on impact/unit of distance travelled.

Finally, conversations with "design folks."

One of the discussions was on the motivation that companies (and societies) have for "doing the right thing" even if it is not possible to fully compute the benefits today. Sounds like the NPV discussion!

I was chatting with a particularly clever designer and we came up with a neat "app" for your smart phone or pad computer - "text messages from the future." Meaning, some algorithm for sending you, extemporaneously, a hypothetical text message from some friend (or relative) far in the future commenting on their life experience, or job or some other topic - just like you get text messages from folks today.

We thought of one - "Hi great-great-grandpa, wish you had cut down on your CO2 emissions 50 years ago; bought a new respirator today and my sister just moved to a great ocean front place in Savannah." LOL (not).

What do you think are likely text messages from the future?

We'll get back to more on green technology next time. And, let me know if you have ideas about calculating the leverage effect of your green technology wedges.

Leveraging manufacturing for a sustainable world

2010-11-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

Or, more beef!

I recently attended a conference on high performance manufacturing in Gifu Japan focussing on a variety of technical advances to push manufacturing ahead in the face of increasing competition, rising costs, difficult to process materials and changing requirements due to advanced product designs. A sub theme of the conference was energy efficient manufacturing.

One of the keynote speakers was a senior managing director of Toyota in Japan. In his presentation, in which he concentrated on the production of hybrid vehicles, he covered a number of manufacturing challenges Toyota was tackling with respect to getting more performance out of the automobile components. His examples ranged from magnetic elements for motors (which they stamp and assemble from materials with decreasing concentrations of rare earth metals!), to braking/energy recovery systems, to battery storage elements, to other power train components a heat recirculation system that shortens engine warmup time - all boosting fuel efficiency.

This work at Toyota tracks the performance improvement discussed in the last posting but, this time, for electric motors and systems and not internal combustion engines. The result is systems that hold a larger charge for a longer period of time increasing the range of the vehicle without engine assistance and, thus, dramatically improving vehicle performance.

A major portion of the improvement cited by Toyota for reducing CO2 emissions are due to merging (consolidating) production lines and discontinuing processes. This means looking for ways to remove, or eliminate, process steps in manufacturing by developing new technology with better capability to convert materials (recall that manufacturing is basically "shape transformation") with fewer process operations. Or, eliminate them altogether.

This resulted in a total annual CO2 emissions of the company to 1.22 million tons - a reduction of almost 10% since the previous year (see their 2010 corporate sustainability report (CSR), page 29 for details). The per vehicle CO2 emission from production was down a bit also - but this could have been greater reduction except for the downturn in sales. Leveraging manufacturing!

Other companies, in the regular paper sessions, reported on their efforts to improve performance of their products and cited the impacts of their products in use. A paper by Mori Seiki engineers started out listing an estimate of the power consumption/green house gas emissions of their installed base of machines worldwide as an indication of the potential for improvement in machine operation and process improvement. This will serve as a basis to track the impact of their new machines introduced to the market which will, presumably, offer substantially reduced energy consumption (and hence green house gas emission). The goal is 40% reduction!

My immediate reaction was that this is a bold move to "own up" to the performance of your product (even in the customer's hands) to establish a base line of performance. I was reminded of Toyota who list the cumulative savings of CO2 the 2.5 million hybrid vehicles they've sold compared to equivalent gasoline powered vehicles (Toyota CSR, 2010, page 24). This provides a baseline for measuring improvement. The figure below, from the Toyota CSR, shows this impressive reduction.

What if we could show this for all products as they evolve to more energy (or resource) efficient performance? You might think that for automobiles or machine tools this is an easy measure - impact per unit of product (which translates into reduced impact per unit of GDP from our discussion last time about the impact equation).

But not all improved performance can be easily equated to reduced impact per unit of GDP. There are many things that are sold in the world - but not all of them contribute productively to our life, or work, or well being.

It made me to wonder whether of not we could extend this kind of impact per unit to other products. What might the rules be for this (meaning what kinds of products would fit the analysis)?

It seems like it would have to be something that performs a function as a product, where function is a useful benefit, like transportation, or washing clothes or dishes or a tool used in production. Or, it must relate to quality of life (but not necessarily video games which use less energy or an iPod with a longer battery life for a charge).

What about food? One can't really deliver "more protein/unit" unless we eat fish paste (although, spending time in Japan one realizes just how many different forms of nourishment you can eat!).

I'm not finished thinking about this but if you have some ideas on extending the concept of reduced impact/product unit to a wider range of products let me know.

At the end of the conference we visited the Mazak Machine Tool Company's manufacturing facility. They practice something they call "done in one" which refers to using one machine in place of several individual process steps - basically multi-tasking on steroids. I discussed the potential of such approaches in a posting on "green balancing" last December. And this fits with Toyota's consolidating production steps/eliminating processes. Mazak gave an example of applying this to a crankshaft prototype production operation which went from 13 machines to 1, and a reduction of 2800 hours of processing to 8! Done in one. There is some info about this on their website.

So, if Mori Seiki (or Mazak) reduce the machine's consumption by 40% while reducing the product manufacturing phase impact as well by process consolidation or elimination, and then the product goes on to have a substantially improved fuel consumption (in the case of an automobile) with dramatically reduced CO2 emissions - that's leveraging manufacturing. And that's a technology wedge that takes a big bite out of the gap between business as usual and a sustainable level of performance.

And, if you'd like another neat example of eliminating process steps for dramatic improvement, "google" grind hardening or see an example on the Mori Seiki website. It avoids a heat treatment step which, usually, accounts for a substantial portion of energy consumption in production of precision hardened components - like shafts.

For the talk I gave at this Japanese conference I prepared a graphic to summarize the concept of leveraging manufacturing, see below.

It is a bit of a busy image but this shows the amplifying effect of manufacturing improvements (including the reduction in manufacturing phase impact or consumption) on the eventual benefit in product use. And, from my observation and evidence from other companies (like the Toyota and Mori Seiki examples) the characterization of small seeds of process improvement yielding large rewards over use is right on target.

More on this in the future I am sure!

Where's the beef?

2010-10-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Or, how manufacturing affects product use performance

First of all, this has nothing to do with meat clothing!

Remember our discussion a while back about "buy-to-fly" ratio? This was referring to the amount of the materials that actually end up in the product as one metric of material utilization efficiency (July 2, 2010 posting). The variation in that ratio was impressive with some of our more sophisticated products having very low ratios (structural elements of aircraft, for example, due to the challenging requirements of shape and strength.)

Another consideration is impact, or resource utilization, from manufacturing the product versus using the product. That is, the use vs manufacturing phase trade-off.

One of my research students, Teresa Zhang, had done an interesting analysis for a number of common products some time ago as part of her early work on her PhD in my lab. One of her charts is shown below and plots use phase resource intensity as a function of manufacturing phase resource intensity.

We see here that "things that don't move or need power to operate" like bridges, furniture, etc are dominantly manufacturing phase consumers of resources and, by extension, impact. Things that do "move and need power to operate" like automobiles, airplanes, etc. are use phase heavy. Interesting to note are the items that are close to the break-even 45 degree line. Personal computers overall, but not the chips in them, are a bit heavier in the manufacturing phase than use phase. Cell phones more heavy (but likely not if you include the embedded impact of the infrastructure needed to operate a cell phone network.) As usual, the details matter.

I was reminded of this during a presentation at a conference I attended recently in Germany during the presentation by a representative of the automaker VW in Germany. In the course of his slide show, he mentioned that, by their analysis, about 20% of the impact of a typical VW Golf A4 car came from manufacturing while 80% was due to the use phase. I had seen data on the GolfA3 (marketed from 1991-1999, also called the Polo) from some time ago and the comparison was similar. The figure below, from Volkswagen AG, and Harald Florin, PE Europe/IKP-University of Stuttgart, Germany (PE is the supplier of Gabi LCA software), shows the energy consumption during the manufacturing phase of the GolfA3 in Gj/auto.

Materials and part suppliers account for much of the embedded energy in the manufacturing phase. Machined components, such as the gear box and engine are a small percentage of the total (accounting for about 10% overall or about 25% with materials and parts from suppliers excluded).

If we look at the impact of the auto, including car production, fuel production and use phase, see below from the same source, we see that the fuel production and consumption in the use phase dominates all categories of emissions to air and water with the exception of dust generated by material production and casting of some components and painting of the vehicle and biological oxygen demand impacts on water.

More recent data I've seen from Volkswagen for the Golf A4 indicates that some improvements have been made (for example reduction of primary energy used in production, use and end of life due primarily to improved fuel consumption (a 20% improvement from 8.1 liter of fuel/100 km to 6.5 l/100 km for the gasoline engine).

In a posting on September 1st 2009 discussing the influence of precision manufacturing (and manufacturing in general) on environmental impacts I started out reviewing the basic impact equation (in terms of environmental damage, consumption, etc.) which is simply:

Impact = Population x (GDP/person) x (Impact/GDP)

I commented that population grows with time and most countries strive to improve GDP/capita since that drives living standards, etc. The rate of consumption or environmental impact per unit of GDP is the "rate of damage" done as a result of the technology driving the growth in GDP and is really the only "knob" we can adjust to reduce impact. I noted that engineers are most effective at changing technology that affects Impact/GDP. To the extent we can reduce that impact we are, effectively, greening the process.

So, if we look a bit closer at the VW numbers, does this make sense in terms of reducing the impact/GDP? If we focus only on manufacturing phase we may not be encouraged - specially if the predominant impact is in the use phase. Let me elaborate.

Let's go back to our VW Golf example of 20% manufacturing phase impact versus 80% use phase impact. If we then think about the area I work in a lot, machining, and we assume about 20% of the manufacturing is machining or machining related, that gives us a potential for improvement of 20% of 20% or only 4% (and then if we get rid of all machining!). Let's assume that some of the snappier technology for improving machining efficiency is employed, say some specialty tooling material that reduces machining power consumption, and that is worth another 20%. Now we are down to .8% (20% of 4%).

Hardly worth the effort it would seem. Of course, if you are paying the electricity bill for the factory and this .8% technology wedge is added to a lot of others in machine operation it can add up to real savings. But, maybe still not impressive compared to use phase impacts. That is, over the full life cycle of the auto.

But, if we follow that logic we are leaving a lot of potential impact reduction from manufacturing "on the table."

In the precision posting I referred to above, I mentioned that a major German auto manufacturer has been working to improve the "power density" of some of its diesel engines over the past years and has seen an improvement of almost a factor of 3 in power per unit of displacement. That means, for the same engine size (displacement) they have managed to squeeze three times as much power out. Coupled with advanced fuel injector systems operating at very high pressures (once thought absurd) they see enhanced performance in a small engine - increased fuel economy, improved acceleration (due to reduced mass), and reduced emissions.

The chart below, from Daimler, shows the improvement in power density as a function of time. The different colors indicate the increasing pressures in the fuel injector systems feeding fuel to the engine.

This is impressive and seems to keep growing without bound. Same size engine, better fuel efficiency and power generation.

How can this be?

Precision manufacturing! The posting on precision gives an example of how this could work for a Boeing aircraft based on tightened tolerances allowing increased structural performance by better control on dimensions - resulting in lower weight components. It is similar for the Daimler engine whose performance is tracked in the graph above. With better tolerances, better surface finishes, better control of orifice size and shape on the fuel injector nozzles (with diameters on the order of 60 microns), tighter control on cooling channels and fluid flow in the engine due to enhanced casting techniques, and on and on, the engine (still working on the same old Diesel principles) performs dramatically better.

The "dog leg" in the chart above corresponds to the introduction of high performance, precision, manufacturing to the power train in the automobile. Similar improvements can be see in the transmission as well.

That is how to reduce the impact per GDP.

Manufacturing dramatically increasing the efficiency of fuel utilization in the internal combustion engine. The small percentage of manufacturing phase improvement has a giant leverage effect on use phase impact. Since the principal element in use phase impact of the automobile the reduction in consumption (due to increased power density of the engine) hits both the fuel production impact as well as the fuel consumption impact. In the Golf A3 figure for emissions, 90% of the CO2 impact was due to use phase (81% from driving and 9 % from fuel production). A doubling of the fuel economy, by manufacturing induced engine efficiency improvements, by precision machining and processing will essentially halve that (same distance driven) - or account for, in the case of the Golf A3, a reduction of some 16 tons of CO2. And if, in the process of manufacturing enhancement, we save most of our 4% impact from machining, that's .4 ton of CO2. So, for our .4 ton we get a return of 16 tons (a factor of 40!)

Now that's a return you can't beat.

OK, the calculation may not be quite that simple, but we are seeing the same order of magnitude of leverage effect here. And some may argue that this improvement can't be really counted as a greening effect of manufacturing. But, the motivation is enhanced performance which includes reduced impact. And it is due to manufacturing capability. I'll take that.

That's the true impact of greening manufacturing.

Finally, in an interesting follow on to the last posting about risks associated with material supply, specially for rare materials, Environmental Leader had a reference to a special report on "Eco-competitiveness: safeguarding profitability and the world’s natural resources" by Sonny Masero Vice President CA ecoSoftware EMEA, CA Technologies (download report). The report addresses the challenges of managing a business dependent on, or influenced by, complex labor, resource, or material supply chains. One quote from the report summarizes it well - "Whether it is a skills shortage, a scarcity of raw materials or a lack of capital investment — every organization can be impacted by the shifting availability of external resources. Although businesses can do little to control such fluctuations in supply, they can put strategies in place to limit their dependence on scarce resources. Taking such a proactive approach is particularly important given the ongoing depletion of natural resources, such as oil, gas and water." Great reading!

The rare earth "connection"

2010-10-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

Or, be careful what you ask for

At the very beginning of this blog I presented a number of postings on "why should industry care about green manufacturing." (see post) This included to minimize risk to the business due to supply chain problems for critical resources needed for production or other material related disruptions (like no material available.)

I came across a perfect example of this while traveling recently (and, hence, had access to the Financial Times and International Herald Tribune - neither of which I subscribe to.)

The October 7th edition of the Financial Times newspaper has an article entitled "China tightens its grip on the production of rare earths," written by Leslie Hook. Rare earths are a group of 17 minerals that have strategic applications in a wide range of products and processes. And they are hard to come by (hence the name "rare"!)

Of the earth's supply of these rare earth materials, 97% come from China, 2% come from India, and the remaining 1% come from "other" countries. The US used to be a producer of these materials but the mining and refining can be highly polluting if not properly controlled. So, costs of extraction and processing and environmental regulations encouraged the movement of production to places with lower costs and, regrettably, more lax restrictions or, at least, compliance.

So what? The use of these rare earths is ubiquitous in a wide range of high tech products, processes and products designed to reduce the environmental impact of operation. For example, the FT article cites the following statistics for use:

- 25% in automotive catalytic converters
- 22% in petroleum refining
- 10% in lighting, televisions, etc.
- 11% in materials for polishing glass and production of semiconductors
- 20% metallurgical additives and alloys
- 22% other

It turns out that these rare earths are key to "performance enhancing" materials and products important to us. For example,

- the rhodium in catalytic converters helps to remove harmful by-products of internal combustion engines (even highly fuel efficient ones)
- rare earths in "super magnets" help improve (a lot it turns out) the performance of electric motors in terms of power output with respect to input power (and remember that electric motors account for a major portion of electrical energy used to day - both domestically and industrially; and a number of the greening technologies (wedges) we've been discussing rely on improved electrical motor performance.)
- improved refinery techniques for less polluting fuels
- flat screen TV's and monitors with reduced energy consumption, and
- optical products ranging from specialized lenses for lithography and imaging applications to the bazillions of little lenses in cell phones and small cameras that a whole generation of young people are using to capture inane images of goofy behavior that will be posted on their social networking pages to impress their friends (and in 'cyberspace' in perpetuity) so that later in life when they want to get that dream job at a major corporation some recruiter can find it and say - not impressed. (Sorry, I got a bit carried away there - you get the point!)

The Chinese recently, and I assume entirely coincidentally with the Japanese detention of a Chinese fishing boat in disputed waters and the arrest of its captain, shut off the spigot of rare earths to the Japanese. And, thus the FT article I am referring to. Japan is the largest importer of rare earth materials.

Risk, you say?

Let's follow the trail of bread crumbs.

Japanese seize Chinese boat in disputed waters. Disputed, I believe, because of uncertain ownership following a conflict over 50 years ago precipitated by a country trying to, among other motives, secure sources of natural resources and energy (I am not a historian - if someone thinks I am off on my analysis let me know!). The Chinese interrupt the shipment of rare earth materials, materials needed to produce high tech products and enable processes to reduce the environmental impact of other processes and products. Companies relying on the supply of these materials see the supply chain stretching taut - panic thoughts emerge in heads of these companies (or at least in the supply chain manager.) Fortunately, the Japanese release the boat captain and materials, again by sheer coincidence, begin to flow again. Whew, close one.

How can a company watch out for an extemporaneous event on the high seas that might, in domino effect, interrupt its production?

I am reminded here of a great book (and BBC series) from some years back by a British author James Burke called "Connections." Using some fascinating history sleuthing to "connect the dots" he shows along several lines the connection between technology development (and what is driving it) and commercial and political development. One line he followed was the nexus between precision engineering and fabrication techniques, the invention of the sea-worthy chronometer (previous instruments had suffered from the rolling action of ships, temperature variations, the high salty humidity of the air, and lower quality of fabrication to render them practically useless on long sea voyages), and the spread of British naval and commercial influence worldwide. Seafarers could now reliably get there and back with improved navigation aids and maps - all synchronized by accurate time keeping. Sort of a 18th century equivalent to GPS of today.

Today, we could build a similar story about anticipating and reducing risk in manufacturing.

I've a lot more to say about precision manufacturing and sustainability impacts prompted by some recent conversations I've had and remarks heard at conferences by industry leaders. More on that next time.

In the mean time, the world may be flat as Thomas Friedman points out, but some folks are sitting on mountains of critical resources, and the view from up their is decidedly different! Fortunately, as one of the Japanese researchers pointed out in the FT article, scarcity and risk of supply interruption drive innovation - in this case to find replacement, more commonly available, materials to substitute for the rare earths or ways to more efficiently use them. And the more the costs of these materials go up (remember, the market place rewards risk and uncertainty with higher material prices) the more incentive we have to find replacements or, in the case of the US which has reasonable wealth of these still in the ground, resume producing them with all the necessary safeguards and procedures in place.

That's a business strategy to reduce risk.

Finally, a comment from some time ago from one of the readers is appropriate to this discussion. It is complicated, so I am repeating the whole comment, and question posed from Steve Hanna following the post):

Let's say company "A" learns of a green house gas (GHG) "hot spot" in its supply chain, say manufacturer "X" of widgets. Company "A" is purchasing substantial widgets from company "X" whose attributable production equals 80 tons of C02 emissions annually. Company "A" finds company "Y" who produces the same quality widgets (and pricing) that only takes company "Y" 1 ton of C02 emissions per year to produce. If company "A" decides to dump company "X" for company "Y", it is indeed a good steward to the earth but does company "A" receive any credit (offset or anything) for mitigating C02 emissions within its supply chain via Scope 3 indirect emissions?

In other words, are their any incentives/credits for companies who lean out their supply chains? After all, company "A" is mitigating 79 tons of C02 emissions from entering the atmosphere by switching to company "Y"'s product over the energy-intensive company "X" product. Can any of the savings be attributable to company "A"s footprint?

This is a great hypothetical and although I am not an expert on all the associated counting mechanisms over the different scopes, I have to say that I believe Company A can take credit for the reduction due to this switch. Certainly if they are tracking this in their annual corporate sustainability report (CSR) they can count this. And, specially in California where we are looking at how to identify and then, I assume, count GHG in products coming into the state.

But, there may be other opinions out there. Let Steve and I know (i.e. comment!). I also like the concept of a GHG (or any other) "hot spot" as a way to identify sources of loss or potential savings in a process, facility or supply chain. And, apropos our discussion above, how about risk "hot spots"?

More on this next time also.

One last item, Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu has a blog! He is in government now but remember he was a Berkeley professor before! In his recent posting he commented on the need to revitalize American manufacturing. He starts out with "Some people think our economy can run on white collar and service jobs alone, but they are wrong. We can and must make high quality products in America. We are on the verge of a new Industrial Revolution and I believe it will revolve around the greatest untapped opportunity of our time, clean energy."

I couldn't agree more. The potential for manufacturing technology to address the emerging clean energy market (he continues talking about battery manufacturing), greener manufacturing technologies and facilities, and greener products manufactured in the US is huge.

Don't be distracted by the shiny bits

2010-09-28T02:28:00.000-07:00

Or, is there any there, there?

When ever I am thinking of what would be a good topic to build the next posting around I never have to wait long till something pops up. This time…the peculiar intersection of celebrity and the environment.

Maybe you did not see this (it was hard to miss if you read even the mainline press) but a "musician" (or actually performance artist) named Lady Gaga showed up at a music awards program dressed in a "meat dress." You have to read this to believe it as reported by Ecouture magazine website. So, standing next to Cher wearing something "cher-like" is this celebrity covered in thinly sliced beef. The article comments that "the American chanteuse’s Atkins-approved getup, [was] made entirely of slabs of tenderloin, strip steak, flank steak, and rump roast (about $100 worth of the cheaper cuts, notes one New York butcher)." Who says there is no innovation in the US?!

Normally I'd let this one drop without comment but the firestorm of comments about the "environmental impact" (what about mental impact?!) was interesting. Pundits reacting pointing out the tremendous impropriety of this getup with perspectives ranging from "people are starving and she's wasting meat" to "do you know how much green house gas emissions are contributed by livestock production?" (Turns out a lot - according to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization study reported a few years back - more than transportation.)

If one looks at climate change per ton of protein production (from the Ecouture article) she should have covered herself in peas or soy beans if she wanted to make an environmentally benign statement. Only lamb is worse than beef generating more than 100 tons of CO2 equivalent emission per ton of production.

The fashion industry has had a lot of problems finding the fine line between really sustainable products and the chic eco-fashion that looks good on paper (you know, organic cotton, recycled plastic, etc.) until you realize you could feed a family of 4 in many parts of the world for a year or more on the cost of the item.

Eco-not.

If you think I'm off on this, check out the Hungry Planet images posted on Time Magazine website showing what the world eats. The photos document the typical weekly food expenditures of a number of families around the world in local currency and dollars. The family in Chad spends $1.23 a week. Show this to your kids!

The first reasonable reaction to this whole event, the article and the response is - who cares?! When is the last time something truly significant, in terms of environmental impact (not withstanding the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster) received so much press? Wouldn't it be more useful (not to mention the environmental impact of all those computers on and users browsing the Lady Gaga article) to actually discuss things with a more potential impact?

This is actually sort of "green-washing" in reverse - meaning the trumping up of a minuscule environmentally impactful event or item with absolutely no potential to grow into something larger (do any of you see a trend to meat clothing?) into something important. This is almost worse than actual greenwashing (recall our discussion on this some postings long ago (July 10 of last year to be exact - see the post).

Just like it's wrong to overplay quasi-green (or non-existent green) aspects of a product or solution as part of the solution to sustainability, it is wrong to overblow a stunt act into something indicative of the future of the planet. Let's stay focused on what is actually something or, as they say, when "there is some there, there."

Also, just to clear any incorrect perceptions, I like meat (specially beef). I was born in Wisconsin and am happy to have farmers raising cows for milk and other uses in the food chain. My shoes contain leather. So, nothing against livestock here!

So, back to reality and some "there"!

As a follow up to our discussion about data flows (drinking from a firehouse), monitoring and dashboards for energy consumption, I mentioned that I visited the Bosch-Rexroth booth at the IMTS show the week before. They sent me some images from the display and this gives some substance to my "Google earth view of manufacturing" that has appeared a number of times in this blog (just search for the term in the box at the top of the blog page if you don't remember this.) At the lowest end of the "manufacturing view" was the machine with tooling and process details.

The figure below, from Bosch-Rexroth's MTX CNC Energy and Power Monitor for energy efficiency, shows the monitoring

strategy with the ability to identify the utilization, and losses, associated with power coming in at the bus, output to the motor, output to the mechanical shaft driving the machine tool (moving the workpiece relative to the cutting tool) and to track this in a dashboard, on an axis by axis basis including the consumption of auxiliary components. There is an article on this in the SME Manufacturing Engineering magazine of April, 2010 if you'd like some details. The figure below shows auxiliary consumption for hydraulics, fans/ventilation, cooling unit and spindle cooling.

With this level of detail associated with the process (what am I producing and how are the machine drives responding?) and the auxiliary components (when I'm not producing product what is my machine consuming? Is is worthwhile to shut some of this down while the machine is in changeover or idle?) the machine tool builder can consider alternate stratifies of machine operation and control, and the manufacturer can (with suitable analysis tools) determine best practices for insuring part quality and minimum energy consumption.

Lots of data but a lot of digestion and presentation so we can handle the deluge...and make decisions.

Now this is worthy of some comments.

To end, I was reading the Economist (September 4, 2010) on a recent plane trip and they had an article titled "Ruses to Cut Printing Costs" with a byline that said "all kinds of technological tricks are being used to reduce the cost and environmental impact of office printers." I was intrigued. Turns out, people are doing all kinds of things to save resources which, for a laser printer (or ink jet), you can try to optimize "print vs toner" by choosing fonts which are thinner and use less toner or ink per character. The article quotes on source as stating that by switching to Century Gothic (which uses less ink) they saved $80/year/printer. The key was noticing that variability of ink/toner required per letter with different fonts!

Another company, a Dutch firm called Ecofont, came up with software to insert into fonts small holes in the letter that are not visible to the eye. This works best apparently on small fonts. They claim to be able to save 25% in the amount of ink or toner used. That's green!

And this is sort of the "office" equivalent of minimum quantity lubrication which reduces, dramatically, the amount of cutting fluid needed to machine a component. I mean reductions from thousands of liters to milliliters. We might discuss this some time in the future.

If your going to print the data from your firehose make sure it has holes in it!

And, finally, last, from the comment section, one commenter asked relative to my posting from the IMTS "did exhibitors or speakers address using the USGBC LEED program helping to provide assurance to end customers of verifiable improvements of manufacturing facilities?" Short answer, I did not see anything on this but, to be fair, was not looking for that angle. The focus of the show was on stuff in the building, not the building itself. Further, most manufacturers are just getting to grips with the operation, or use phase, consumption and not the embedded energy from materials, buildings, etc. used to produce the hardware. But that is coming.

Many companies have started working on the lighting, heating and ventilation, compressed air, etc. plant wide large scale energy consumers. But, there is much to be done. I'll check with some of my contacts to see if there are any examples of successful verifiable improvements. I am sure they are out there. Any readers can send me the contact info and I'll pass it on to the commenter or use the response section in the last posting to respond directly.

Drinking from a firehouse, part 2

2010-09-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

The greatest show on earth

This week I am writing from the IMTS in Chicago also known as the "greatest (manufacturing) show on earth" to paraphrase Barnum and Bailey. And it is a bit of a circus. Instead of rings you have several large halls chock full of the latest manufacturing technology (hardware and software) and every vendor who is anyone is here showing their stuff. Lot's of noise (machine and human), lot's of people, it's great.

So, what does this have to do with our firehouse analogy?

Let me elaborate. The "hidden" theme of this show is energy and resource consumption. The concern about energy monitoring, display and decision-making is pervasive. Not in the banner over the booth, but in the displays on the floor. Specially for the large control and motor/driver manufacturers like Fanuc, Siemens, and Bosch-Rexroth. They are all showing technologies for measuring and displaying energy data on controller or dashboards on computers.

Other companies are pushing the application of their machines and solutions to the growing alternate energy market - for example MAG is pushing production of wind and solar components, large and small, and OKUMA has a banner proclaiming "Solutions for Energy." Every one is seeing the push to reduce and the potential for market share in creating the solutions.

And why? Demand from customers, growing business opportunities and/or push back from people using their systems in production.

One of the people I have interesting discussions with about the trends of manufacturing and what's hot and what's not is a principal in a large high precision manufacturing company in the midwest. They have a range of clients from medical device to aerospace and the US Navy. To see their facility is to observe parts being made of tiny medical devices on a "Swiss" rotary transfer machine all the way to cowling components for surrounding the jet engines on the Airbus A380 giant airplane.

They also do work for companies like Johnson and Johnson and when I asked my friend if they are getting any serious push from their customers on energy he gave me a resounding YES!

Johnson and Johnson have a statement on their website, amongst a list of their expectations for the company's environmental performance, that their goal for External Manufacturing (ie my friend's company) is "100 percent of external manufacturers in conformance with Johnson & Johnson Standards for Responsible External Manufacturing by 2010." To date JNJ state that they have "shared our Standards and/or integrated these standards into formal contracts with more than 80 percent of our external manufacturers by year-end 2007." Performance on the environment in the contract with their external manufacturers!

This means data…data on energy consumption of manufacturing…which means data from machines on performance cross linked to parts…meaning energy data linked to steps in the production of the part including on a line by line basis for the program code driving the machine tool in the case of material removal processes. This adds up to a lot of data - the subject of the last posting.

Recall that we had estimated that sampling energy data values for a "medium sized facility" for a day (here meaning 25 CNC machines, 10 programmable logic controlled machines and assorted other handling and line equipment with 8 data sources per machine at a sample rate of 5 hertz) would yield a data stream of 86,400,000 data points each day. And that if we added the other sources, we'd likely end up with 100 million data values a day to deal with.

So, let's continue our discussion from last time. Data can be related to events and information associated with those events. Thus, data can be understood as something that occurred either at a specific time or over a range of time. In manufacturing systems, events can be a numerical value (for example, the instantaneous power consumption at a specific time) or can be a type of annotation (for example, the alarm state of the machine tool over an interval). Complex events are abstractions of events that are created by combining simple events. For example, based on simple events pertaining to the tool position, the instantaneous power consumption, and the machine tool’s program in machining a part, we can create maps linking power and stages of part production.

The paper I referred to in the last posting describes what is called "events stream processing techniques" that include rules engines (RE) and complex event processing (CEP). These techniques can be used to create higher level abstract events and reason on them by pattern matching and identification. The figure below is an example of software architecture for temporal analysis. This spans multiple data

inputs from several devices, standardized data bus (e.g. MTConnect), and use of rules and complex event processing to create these "maps linking power and production."

My friend can use this to answer J&J's concerns about how much energy they are using to create the products they make. And, we can extend this to water, other resources, or whatever the customer wants tracked. And, knowing consumption is the first step to reduction.

The paper from part one of this posting went on to show the results of a case study applied to an energy
monitoring and analysis framework using energy consumption and process parameter profiles from machining experiments.

But at the show, Dr. Vijayaraghavan (the coauthor on the paper we were discussing in the last posting on data handling) and his company System Insights had a neat demo in the Mazak booth showing the real time implementation of this. On a website you can see, for a number of Mazak machine tools of varying sizes, the instantaneous power consumption. If you click on one of the machine icons you go to a "Mazak Energy Dashboard") for the machine (see below) and get the data, over time periods of

whatever you like for the operation of the machine. You can see total energy use (in kWh), energy cost (for the location you choose - US, Japan, Germany or, in the US, state by state), and "savings" relative to a benchmark machine test in the categories of energy, money (based on cost of energy), Co2 emission equivalent (based on the energy to CO2 conversion for the locality's energy mix) as well as that equivalent in terms of Al cans saved, miles of auto driving or use of compact fluorescent lamps. And, it has in the lower right hand corner an cool real-time power meter readout.

A further chart from that machine window shows real time power plot over time and summary info, shown below for the Integrex i200S Mazak machine tool. The summary numbers are a bit

different in the two figures as I accessed the data on the website at different times as I was preparing this posting. If we dig deeper, as in the figure last posting September 6th on examples of analysis across temporal scales, we can see the ability to correlate power with specific machine motions. That is next on the dashboard.

This starts to convert our firehouse of data into rather manageable mouthfuls!

I visited the Bosch-Rexroth booth and they were showing similar information albeit, in this case, from a specific set of servos driving a machine simulator.

It's happening. Data flows will increase. Are you thirsty?!

Drinking from a firehose

2010-09-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

Or, data collection for energy and resource monitoring

I mentioned last posting that I was attending a manufacturing conference in Italy the end of August and that there was a lot more discussion about some aspects of green and sustainable manufacturing - at least efficient use of energy.

This is supported by business surveys and comments in the business press reflecting, I assume, the interaction with business folks "in the know" on such matters. A recent McKinsey special topics report titled "The next environmental issue for business" gives some interesting statistics on what matters most to business. The report actually was focused mainly on biodiversity and the importance that holds i the minds and hearts of business. We can get back to that topic in the future (and read the report…it is interesting).

I was intrigued by the more general data given in the McKinsey report on issues of importance to business (and based on a responses of almost 1600 survey takers). The top vote getter was "climate change/energy efficiency" coming in at 43%. next in line was "waste/pollution/recycling" with 42%. Following that was "water scarcity/water quality/sanitation at 27%. There are 10 other categories of issues ranging from data privacy to global public health. And, "biodiversity" was 10th on the list. Another "environmental" related concern was toxic materials at 14%. (Note: the respondents ranked a number of issues; so, the percentages will not add to 100!)

I was pleased to see the top three as close to our topic of green manufacturing since they deal with, in order, energy we use and its impact, things we throw away/waste and things from the environment used to make our product besides energy - here water.

Water is often overlooked in all the concern about energy. Not by everyone however! Caterpillar has a goal of "hold[ing] water use flat" as they increase their business listed in their 2009 Corporate Sustainability Report. The website (link to report) gives a short discussion of Cat's plan to determine the "true cost of water" and includes the following statement:

"Without good data it is impossible to justify the cost of water-saving initiatives."

They go on to explain how a program in 2009 at one of Caterpillar’s American plants launched a program "to quantify how much water it was using in its different processes, and the costs associated with water use in each process – including water bills, chemicals, labor, maintenance and energy. The project helped the plant identify its most expensive water processes and associated costs and justified the capital expenditure needed to implement savings."

They plan to extend this program to other Caterpillar facilities in 2010.

Good data … and plenty of it!

Ditto for energy, other resources, etc. throughout the factory.

In the manufacturing conference in Italy I attended, the CIRP General Assembly, I presented a paper co-authored with one of my recent graduate students, Dr. Athulan Vijayaraghavan, titled "Automated Energy Monitoring of Machine Tools." The full reference is "CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 21–24." (Let me know if you'd like a copy.)

This paper laid out the immense challenges associated with trying to acquire, store and process the streams of data from a variety of machines in a variety of systems throughout a variety of factories. This is done in the hope of, first, understanding where energy (in this case) and other resources (like water) are used and then how to meet the kind of goals the Caterpillar folks are aiming at. This means, understanding the nexus between process operation and resource use to be able to find ways to minimize the use per unit of output. That is, decouple the process and resource equation so we can effectively reduce the "impact/GDP" discussed a few postings back to reduce overall impact of manufacturing.

We focussed on only the machine tool…but the approach can be extended much more broadly.

If you think about making this "connection" between resource consumption and process, you need to first determine the rate of data you need to make the link. For energy, this can range from parts of seconds to hours.

You may recall our discussion some postings ago (January 21, 2010 to be exact) about "temporal vs spatial" aspects of manufacturing. We can create a similar diagram to illustrate this discussion of data rate

demands for tracking energy and resource use. The figure highlights the data rates for machine tools but, for broader sections of the enterprise, you can see the time scale also. The idea is you need sufficiently high data rates to capture the process effects or variability you are trying to associate the use with. Then, we can see how adjusting those parameters or variations can yield savings (without, of course, sacrificing quality or cost.)

Here is another illustration from the paper showing the use of energy in the context of the manufacturing process. The objective is to have data rates "tuned" to the process so one can extract such

Time scale of data collection for energy use in the context of manufacturing process

information as:

- energy usage per day (lot or batch basis),
- embedded energy during manufacturing a part (piece basis),
- energy used for value-added and non-value-added activities (between productive operations),
- relationship between spikes/troughs and process parameters (details of process operations),
- impact of process parameters on sub-component loads (what's going on around the machine or line), and
- energy used for machining specific part features (related to part design/geometry and functionality.)

This information depends on vastly differing data rates with sampling times varying from milliseconds to minutes.

The data volumes can be impressive. In the paper we give a sample of the number of energy data values for a "medium sized facility" for a day. This facility is comprised of 25 CNC machines, 10 programmable logic controlled machines and assorted other handling and line equipment. For the CNC machines alone, assuming 8 data sources per machine at a sample rate of 5 hertz (5 times/second), we will have a data stream of 86,400,000 data points each day. If we add the other sources, with reasonable numbers of data collection sites and data rates, we would likely end up with over 100 million data values a day to deal with.

Drinking form a firehouse indeed!

So, what's the solution?

The paper proposes a structure for, first, standardizing data (for example using MTConnect), implementing a modular, scalable architecture that supports multiple concurrent data streams and sources and, importantly, employs multi-dimensional reasoning tools.

There is more to discuss on this but this is more than we can cover in one posting. I'll finish the discussion next time.

If you are interested in this approach in the mean time, Dr. Vijayaraghavan has a company working on the hardware and software aspects of this - System Insights. They are already working with a number of companies and will be demoing some of their solutions at the upcoming IMTS (International Manufacturing Technology Show) in Chicago later this month. (In interest of full disclosure, I am an advisor to System Insights.)

By the way, the IMTS is the "mother of all manufacturing shows" and I plan to attend to check out what the view on green manufacturing is from the show floor.

The next blog will be from Chicago!

Lead, follow or get run over!

2010-08-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

Standards for environmental performance in manufacturing

I was attending a manufacturing conference in Italy this last week and one of the major topics of discussion was green and sustainable manufacturing. There are a lot of other topics to be sure - but this one is building steam. The discussions range from process level issues, similar to the ones we've been discussing, to systems approaches, to design and, at one session, standards.

Not surprisingly, the standards associations (think ISO) have been busy and also, not surprisingly, the Europeans and Asian industry and some academics have been very busy as part of the standards process.

That light you see coming toward you in the tunnel is not the exit!

Let me elaborate.

The standards under development cover environmental and energy efficiency evaluation methods. Specifically, Professor F. Kimura of Hosei University in Japan outlined the work on ISO 20140 "Automation systems and integration – Environmental and energy efficiency evaluation method for manufacturing systems." According to Professor Kimura, who is participating in the standards development process, the environmental evaluation can focus on either a general environmental "intensity" at a rather high level for a facility or be more specific in nature.

I gather that the difference refers to whether or not a generic product being manufactured or system is evaluated. The system evaluation would apply to a comparison of improvements to a system, say by a change in the process or reconfiguration of a machine line or facility. Measurements might include energy per unit production, waste of materials, etc. For the evaluation of benefits or limitations to the production of a specific part or parts in factories located in different countries, there is provision of a general or specific evaluation of environmental intensity of products in manufacturing.

In the language of ISO, this international standard establishes a method for evaluating environmental influences of manufacturing systems, e.g. energy/resource consumption and pollution.

The standard consists of five parts:
- ISO 20140-1: Overview and general principles
- ISO 20140-2: Guidelines for environmental evaluation procedures (this establishes procedures for environmental evaluation and will guide how to use parts 3 to 5)
- ISO 20140-3: Environmental evaluation index model (this specifies the models for environmental indices, e.g. energy efficiency for manufacturing systems index)
- ISO 20140-4: Environmental evaluation data model (this specifies data models for the environmental evaluation of manufacturing systems)
- ISO 20140-5: Facility life cycle impact and indirect impact model (this specifies data models for a facility life cycle's direct and indirect impact on the environment)

To enable this environmental evaluation of manufacturing systems, various types of data from the manufacturing activity will be needed. Standards help to clearly define this data so that it can be used to perform unambiguous environmental evaluations. If there is generally accepted environmental intensity data for unit processes already available, that can also be used in the evaluation.

Much of the data related with manufacturing system definition and operation have been already standardized in related international standards. These existing standards will be included for use and, where necessary, extended.

Professor Kimura described some examples of the categories of likely required data:

- Manufacturing machine/facility (machine tools, conveyers, etc.),
- Tooling and jigs/fixtures,
- Energy,
- Materials,
- Product (definition, quality, function, etc.),
- Process plan,
- Production plan,
- Other production resources,
- Environmental evaluation data (intensity data, impact factors, etc.),

Based on these data, evaluation procedures of environmental index can be clearly defined. According to the definition of data format, it becomes possible for public organizations and machine/facility producers to publish their data. By relying on such published data in standard formats, reliable and unambiguous environmental evaluation is realized. It also ties in with other existing standards.

For example, there are standards being developed on "Environmental evaluation of machine tools" (ISO/TC 39/WG 12). This is being developed by researchers at ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich. They had a first meeting in May of this year and are working on an ISO series 14955 on this evaluation.

One can find a lot of information about this effort on the web by searching the technical committee (here ISO/TC39/WG12). One link to the Eco Machine Tools stakeholder meeting has several presentations on the elements of this standard.

Professor W. Knapp of ETH is leading this effort. He is a precision manufacturing engineering expert and very familiar with machine tools and their performance. They anticipate four areas of focus for this standard:

- ISO 14955-1, Eco-design methodology for machine tools

- ISO 14955-2, Methods of testing of energy consumption of machine tools and functional modules

- ISO 14955-3, Test pieces/test procedures and parameters for energy consumption on metal cutting machine tools

- ISO 14955-4, Test pieces/test procedures and parameters for energy consumption on metal forming machine tools

The functional modules will allow a certain degree of detail related to energy consumption, for example, the spindle, or drive axes, etc. It was noted that this will only address "use phase" energy - meaning, embedded energy due to raw material extraction, production of the machine or component, transports, set up and end of life energy requirements are ignored. For most of these machines the use phase is dominant.

One of the interesting aspects of these standards activities is the scope. This last standard mentioned will provide guidelines for designing machine tools to meet certain efficiency goals, and then indicate what kinds of parts (shape, complexity, processes needed) to evaluate how well the machine does! The earlier standard will set up a procedure and data requirements for doing comparisons. This will provide a basis of determining whether or not the suggested improvement, or relocation of a facility, will be beneficial environmentally.

One of the illustrations from a presentation made by the ETH folks as part of the TC 39/WG 12 discussion of the standard outlines the system boundaries for the analysis, see figure below. This

defines what inputs and outputs will come into play. Note, in the fine print below the figure, that raw parts in, new tools, etc. and output of machined parts, etc. are not considered if they don't represent a relevant energy flow (figure from Hagemann_Statusreport_ISO found on the stakeholder link above.)

A lot of the motivation for these standards comes out of the CECIMO organization in Europe. They describe themselves on their website as "CECIMO represents the common interests of the European Machine Tool Industries, particularly in relation to authorities and associations. CECIMO promotes the European Machine Tool Industry and its development in the fields of economy, technology and science."

Remember the early discussions about what motivates green manufacturing? I mentioned one was regional organizations - like CECIMO. The industry is taking the initiative on this.

In the future, we will be designing and building machines and systems to meet these standards. And our factories producing products will be assessed using these standards.

Once again, the "Everett and Jones" philosophy (http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/11/stylish-longevity.html) comes into play! Let's not be in the "what happened" category on this one.

I don't intend to. I'm going to follow this one closely and, as "unexciting' as standard development can be, this will be interesting!

We'll keep an eye on the standards activity and I will likely offer more details in the future.

A final point about technology and its impact on energy and the environment.

At another meeting I attended this summer, this one for the Machine Tool Technology Research Foundation (MTTRF) Dr. Masahiko Mori, President of Mori Seiki, gave an interesting presentation on where green product developments will likely impact manufacturing (and, by extension) green manufacturing. He cited some data from Nikkei Monodukuri on the number of parts in an engine for a conventional automobile versus a motor for an electric vehicle - 10,000 to 30,000 vs approximately 100, respectively!

This may seem like a simplistic comparison … but consider the complexity and impact of designing, manufacturing, storing or transporting and assembling 10,000 parts (not to mention the material issues and the building/floorspace requirements) compared to around 100.

This is an example of efficient resource utilization.

Of course there are the other bits needed to make the electric vehicle run - like a battery - but, overall, these are much simpler mechanical devices and will require fewer resources to build and, presumably, be easier to disassemble at end of life to recover the materials.

That's one way to do it!

2010-08-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

Or, how to encourage conservation and save energy

A recent New York Times article discusses the draconian measures being taken by the Chinese government to make the nation more energy efficient ("China Fears Consumer Impact on Global Warming," K. Bradsher, NYT, July 4, 2010). In the last three years China has shut down more than a thousand older coal-fired plants and leads the rest of the world in investment on wind turbines and other clean technology according to the article. In addition, new, stringent, requirements for energy use and auto mileage are in place. But, the concern is that the growing demand of Chinese consumers will overwhelm even these efforts at green house gas (GHG) reduction. Apparently, this last winter and spring showed the largest six-month increase in GHG tonnage ever produced by a single country.

So, swing the ax at the low performers. That's one way to do it.

The NYT articles states that "China’s goal has been to reduce energy consumption per unit of economic output by 20 percent this year compared with 2005, and to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases per unit of economic output by 40 to 45 percent in 2020 compared with 2005."

Recall the "equation" for calculating impact first discussed in the September 1, 2009 posting? It states that:

Impact = Population x (GDP/person) x (Impact/GDP) where GDP stands for gross domestic production

The challenge in China is that, in addition to population growth with time, the increasing standard of living is driving GDP/capita up and, as was noted in September 2009, unless you can reduce the Impact/GDP (that is, the role of manufacturing, energy generation and resource utilization) sufficiently, you will see the impact necessarily rise.

What is "sufficient"? Well, to close the gap between sustainable use of resources and the business as usual level (the chart that grows "up and to the right" for consumption and impact) you need to accomplish both a reduction in impact/GPP to track the required emissions and consumption trends but also reduce the impact/GDP to offset the growing demand of more and more consumers. It is sort of like trying to pay off a mortgage in an inflationary market when you are constantly taking out equity loans on top of the original mortgage. (Gee, we know how that works out!)

So, what to do? One approach is that used by China.

We are not likely to do that in the US. But, if you do business (or want to do business) in China your products may be affected by these regulations and decisions.

What about in the US? A recent Environmental Leader posting, July 15, 2010, on "Gov Contractors Must Track Emissions or Risk Losing Contracts" adds to the discussion. The article states "Contractors for the federal government that do not track their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions could risk losing their contracts, according to a report in the Federal Times about new rules by the General Services Administration (GSA)."

It goes on to say that these rules result from the "GSA’s response to an executive order … issued in October which directed federal agencies to find ways to reduce their GHG emissions. Potentially, the new rules could have far-reaching consequences through the entire economy, not just government contractors."

Apparently, "only" scope 1 and 2 emissions reporting would be required, meaning emissions generated by employee commuting and business travel are not included. (We discussed emission scope reporting requirements in a prior posting.)

Given the large role of manufacturing industry serving as government contractors, this could have a big impact.

First, determine what impact your process has (at least energy to GHG conversion) and then roll out the green technology wedges!

So we may need to respond to consumer pressure or, more likely in the short term, some form of regulation or standardization.

Some may call this taxes of some type. Or at least it has the effect of taxes to many. This is not too popular. I was reminded of Dan Rostenkowski, long time bull of the congress and head of House Ways and Means Committee, who died recently. He headed the committee that wrote most of the tax laws in the UA and he was famously quoted one time as saying "no one calls me up and asks me to raise their taxes!"

Cap and trade, or carbon trading, is often pointed to as one of the "taxes" that will impede industry (while promoting utilization of green technologies for manufacturing.) Another article on Environmental Leader's site calls that into question however. It is not simple. Apparently European Union (EU) companies are offsetting their emissions by improving the competitiveness of their competitors offshore through these carbon credit purchases (!) - so-called "leakage" - moving their business outside the EU. But, it doesn't appear to be increasing outsourcing of business overall according to other reports.

The article gives a neat site by Sandbag that shows a map illustrating the international trade in offsets between the EU and the rest of the world in 2009.

Programs like cap and trade, or regulation, or industry norms adopted to improve the impact of a specific industry all move us towards greener manufacturing. They occur because of competitiveness of countries and regions, real concerns about environment, customer demand, or just plain good economic or business sense.

Apropos that last comment about good business sense, I mentioned in a posting recently the comments of Jeff Immelt of GE on greening industry. He said that "with respect to companies like GE that want to stay ahead of the curve in terms of investing to maintain competitiveness and profitability, … it’s going to change in like, 15 minutes one day.” “I guarantee that’s going to happen.” He followed on commenting that since no one can predict when this will happen - you have to plan for this in your business strategy.

Regulation and industry norms take time. Breakthroughs in technology or process improvements can occur instantly. Be ready!

Degrees of Perfection, Part 4

2010-08-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

Last of a 4 part series

We've been talking about exergy (or available energy and useful work) as part of this series. Last posting I reviewed the work of Professor Tim Gutowski of MIT on energy fundamentals in manufacturing. We'll continue along this line for this last in the series with an example from Professor Gutowski's work.

This series has generated some good comments and feedback. One pointed out a mistake in the previous posting (already corrected!) when I used the word "irreversibly" in place of reversibly - the correct word. This was in the quote from Gutowski's paper stating that exergy "represents the maximum amount of work that could be extracted from a system as it is reversibly brought equilibrium …" That is an important catch … sort of like using "nonpotable" for "potable." Thanks to that careful reader. More on some of the other comments below.

Now, on to an example.

Last time we spoke of a "typical" manufacturing system represented by a series of "boxes and arrows" connected serially and representing the individual processes and the connecting material transport between processes. We stated that we can replace (or augment) these arrows between boxes (or going into the box) with the systems mass, energy and entropy interactions. That means that each stage of a process can will have material flows or interactions as well as work and heat interactions. And there will be losses.

An earlier paper by Professor Gutowski used electrical energy in manufacturing from an energy perspective. The paper is titled "Electrical Energy Requirements for Manufacturing Processes and it was published in the Proceedings of the 13th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering Conference in 2006. You can find this publication on the web - it is number 23 under environmental publications.

In the last posting we talked about using exergy as a metric of performance. Gutowski tackles that in this paper.

Gutowski explains as a setup to the analysis that energy measures the potential of all materials to do work. "Fuels naturally have high values of exergy, but many other working materials, including pure metals, plastics and other organics, can have since we can then express these material and energy inputs and outputs in the same unit, usually joules (J).

He goes on. "Secondly, since the development of the concept of exergy is based upon the second law of thermodynamics, and not the first, it is not conserved. Hence this metric provides a measure of what is actually “used up” in the manufacturing process. As a result, a complex energy and material flow problem can be substantially simplified by using exergy analysis."

The process is broken up into two steps:
- 1) identify the system boundaries (that is the limits of the "box" we are analyzing, and
- 2) identify the exergy inputs and outputs.

Then, the difference between the inputs and the outputs is the exergy lost.

The paper explains that this "difference" can be used to "account for material transformations, including the conversion of raw working materials into products, wastes, and emissions, and the conversion of fuels (through combustion) into heat (to do work), wastes, and emissions." One can also extend the concept to incorporate all other energy sources, for example hydro, solar, electrochemical, and others.

Typically, we would consider the conversion of fuel (such as oil, coal or natural gas) to generate electricity which is then used in the manufacturing process for material conversion by, say, machining, grinding, welding, forming, forging, etc. As pointed out in an earlier posting on the variations of impacts depending on differing fuels for energy in different parts of the world, the exact fuel to energy relationship will vary.

The paper reminds us that to be fully consistent, we should take in to consideration the energy used to produce the materials we are "transforming" and, as this blog has argued, include the manufacture of the machinery to do the transforming as well.

The figure below, from Gutowski's paper, illustrates the energy and material inputs and outputs for a manufacturing process. This is a streamlined version of the input-output example discussed on the November 12th posting discussion whether or not lean is green and you can refer to that for additional background on "what's in the box." The example

followed in the paper deals with an automobile production machining line. As we've discussed in earlier postings, the machines used in these manufacturing lines have a number of elements and components that operate in parallel with the actual processing operation. For example, in the paper we are discussing, Gutowski mentions work handling, chip removal and treatment (removing oil) for recycling, tool changes, machine axis and spindle lubrication and temperature control, etc. in addition to actually machining the part. The figure representing this data for a typical automotive manufacturing machining line is below, from Gutowski, and shows the energy use breakdown as a function of vehicles produced.

So, as with our "tare heavy" and production "process heavy" discussion some postings ago) - this is an excellent example of tare heavy manufacturing. Here, a maximum of about 15% of the energy actually goes into machining the part. Granted, this is for a production line so there will be some expenditures of energy that might not be seen with a standalone machine tool. But, this is not very good.

One of the observations of the paper is that there is a variation with production rate. In fact, for standalone machine tools which may actually reach 60% or 70% energy usage for machining (and, thus, 40% or 30% for "all other") this maximum utilization varies with production rate as well. The takeaway is that, in production, there is a significant energy consumption for getting the machine ready for production and maintaining the machine (or line) readiness in the face of fluctuating production.

A more important observation from my perspective is that trying to estimate the energy consumption of manufacturing processes by looking only at the physical process (and the physics behind it - like metal cutting and the energy to form a chip, for example) will tell you almost nothing about the total energy consumption.

So what does this say about our "buy to fly ratio" analysis? To me, this is still a good way to characterize the efficiency of the process. In the example above (and under the assumptions detailed in the paper - the "academic fine print"!) we are utilizing at most 15% of the available energy coming into the process. That is, the transformation part of the manufacturing process is overwhelmed by the peripheral activities and requirements of the machine.

This is precisely what we were speaking about in our "low hanging fruit" discussion referenced above and what is motivating a lot of current development work by builders of and users of manufacturing machinery.

More on this to come.

Finally, one of the more prolific commenters to the blog talked about standardizing "by volume the process by which inputs, energy included, are transformed into outputs." A visual thinker! She goes on to say that with this approach "the perfect shape would be a cylinder, where all the outputs are useful, for nature, for humans or for both. The current processes are truncated cones with different "buy-to-fly" ratios symbolized by the ratio between the two bases. The cylinder's ratio is the perfect 1, no volume is lost."

The thought that came to mind when I read this was Rick Steves packing for a long trip on one of his adventures. He always seems to be wearing the same shirt and carries only a small backpack. How does he do that? If true, his "buy to fly" ratio must be close to cylindrical! That's perfection.

And, in the world of twitter - I learned of one called “50 Best Twitter Feeds To Stay On Top Of Green News”. The writer thought some of the blog readers might find it interesting. So, happy twittering!

Degrees of Perfection, Part 3

2010-07-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

Part 3 of a series

Let's talk about exergy (or available energy and useful work).

With, again, apologies that Wikipedia is not a scholarly resource, the definition of exergy from Wikipedia goes like this: "the exergy of a system is the maximum useful work possible during a process." So, a measure of energy is a measure of our ability to achieve the most with what we have - sort of a thermodynamic "buy to fly" ratio!

The paper by Gutowski I referenced at the start of this series on July 2 gives an excellent discussion of the fundamentals of applying this to manufacturing. Gutowski explains that exergy "represents the maximum amount of work that could be extracted from a system as it is reversibly brought to equilibrium with a well-defined environmental reference state." This is usually comprised of physical energy (the portion of the system that can be removed from the system while bringing it's state to a "dead state" at a reference temperature and pressure, and chemical energy. Chemical energy refers to additional available energy potential by bringing the chemical potentials of a compound to equilibrium with its surroundings. Gutowski explains where these reference state data come from. And there are a lot of equations.

Ultimately, you can derive an expression that represents the work rate of a system derived from the explicit terms representing the physical and chemical exergy of the system.

To illustrate exergy flows, an excellent graphical image of the global energy flow, accumulation and destruction starting with sources of energy (solar primarily) to the eventual natural and anthropogenic destruction (that is, due to human activities, as opposed to that occurring in the biophysical environments without human influence) is presented by the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project. The site also shows the global carbon flow and accumulation. Fascinating stuff.

Now comes applying this to manufacturing systems.

We defined some time ago the characteristics of a "typical" manufacturing system represented by a series of "boxes and arrows" connected serially and representing the individual processes and the connecting material transport between processes. (See the posting of November 12, 2009 for a refresher).

We can replace (or augment) these arrows between boxes (or going into the box as in the process box discussion in the posting referenced above) with the systems mass, energy and entropy interactions. Recall that entropy is a measure of "disorder" in a system and it increases over time. A typical example of entropy increasing is ice melting. This from the work of the person most credited with putting forth the idea of entropy, Rudolf Clausius in 1862. There is a change from solid, molecularly ordered ice, to "disordered" water as the water increases in temperature over time. Temperature is usually a conjugate variable of entropy in thermodynamics.

So, each stage of a process can have material flows or interactions as well as work and heat interactions. And, with each step and its associated interactions, there will be losses. These are the materials wasted (and accounting for the buy-to-fly ratio) as well as energy losses. Gutowski's paper goes into this analysis in great detail.

First we need to identify all of these "losses" so we can determine the system performance. Then, we can look at how the losses can be avoided, reduced, or "recovered" to improve the performance of the system.

That is, we then have another "metric" for manufacturing system design, operation and optimization.

More to come on this next time. But, I have some small items of (potential) interest to conclude with this time.

I don't "tweet" and don't follow those who do … but if I did … I would have been madly tweeting away the 13th of July from San Francisco. I was invited to a very splashy event hosted by General Electric touting the successes of their "ecomagination" initiative and announcing a new $200 million "Power Grid Challenge" to spur innovation and entrepreneurship in the electrical grid. The show included the GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, assorted venture capitalist who are helping with the program (like Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, and RockPort Capital), Dr. Arun Majumdar, head of ARPA-E (DOE's advanced research agency for energy technology), the President of PG&E, our local utility, among others. One of two panels was chaired by the editor in chaired of Wired magazine and they have a short writeup on the funding part.

You can also check up on this at a GE website which gives the details and a link to the "challenge" website. The site includes a "tracker" listing the latest statistics on ideas submitted, comments and votes on ideas. They even have an app for an iPhone so you can track this on the road.

The comments of the panelists, including Mr. Immelt, were very interesting. Much was said about the potential for "low hanging fruit" - for example, the use of monitoring technology so the consumer can see their energy use (sometimes called "smart meters) is claimed to drive an immediate 10% reduction in consumption. If you see how much you are using, you use less of it! This relates to energy dashboards for manufacturing we've discussed.

Immelt's comments about the business aspects of conservation and sustainability were exceptionally noteworthy. There was a lot of discussion about the inevitability of the jump to eco-consciousness and clean energy. No one can tell when it will happen but it will. The Wired article referenced above quotes Immelt as saying, with respect to companies like GE that want to stay ahead of the curve in terms of investing to maintain competitiveness and profitability, "…it’s going to change in like, 15 minutes one day.” “I guarantee that’s going to happen.” He followed on commenting that since no one can predict when this will happen - you have to plan for this in your business strategy.

Wow! I felt like he was speaking to me (or maybe that he'd read the blog!)

To top it all off, during a Q&A session the inevitable question came up about all this potential regulation and conservation (specially pricing to encourage reducing consumption) and the impact it will have on business. Immelt stated "you can have a complete industrial base, and it can grow, while reducing green house gas" emission. This has been GE's experience based on information presented as part of their Ecomagination initative. Granted, this is not your small or medium enterprise but a Fortune 100 company (actually a Fortune 6 company!) But that really makes the case for getting on with it!

Finally, I was interviewed on a very interesting radio program the other day. The program, hosted by Colonel Mason, is called "The Promise of Tomorrow" and deals with the business of emerging science and nanotechnology. We spoke about green manufacturing for quite some time. You can listen to the broadcast at his website - it is program #114 broadcast on July 19th (see archives). He also mentions our upcoming book titled Green Manufacturing: Fundamentals and Applications from Springer due out late this fall. More to come on this of course. It is already listed on Amazon if you want to "pre-order" a copy!

Degrees of Perfection, Part 2

2010-07-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of a series

The degree of perfection discussion in the last posting was centered on the term "buy to fly" ratio popular in the aerospace industry to indicate material utilization. I stated that we need to consider all the peripheral "stuff" associated with a product like electronics, appliances, clothing, food, etc. which usually comes packaged so we might want to consider a sort of "buy to fly" ratio for conventional products.

I am aiming in this series to get to a more engineering discussion of exergy (or available energy and useful work) to address this. But, I want to play with this more fascinating buy to fly concept for manufacturing a bit more.

In fact, based on a number of comments I've received on this, others also are intrigued by the extension of buy to fly to more general manufacturing applications and processes. Ralph Resnick, an old friend from my early days of chasing burrs, now at NCDMM, suggested something along the lines of "energy to manufacturing" for tracking the useful output of the process for the energy input. So, let's explore some other ways to implement this idea.

Last week I attended a research review conference held at a machine tool builder's product design and development facility in Northern California (DTL/Mori Seiki). We toured the facility and I noticed a machine, the Mori Seiki NT1000 mill turn center, that touted it's abilty to provide the same functionality in a 95 x 106 inch (or 2.4 x 2.7 meter) footprint that other machines requiring twice the size deliver. That is, more output per unit of floor space occupied. This measure is traditionally emphasized in the semiconductor industry where space in high tech clean rooms is very expensive.

You might recall that some time ago (last December to be exact), as part of a discussion about ways to green machines and processes I did a virtual comparison of a set of individual machines versus a multi-function machine. This NT1000 machine is one of those. So, in addition to the efficiencies of eliminating the other standalone machines, the reduction in floor space gives extra benefit that can be measured in terms of plant environment, lighting, construction costs and materials, etc.

But, let's push this a little further. The NT1000 and similar machines by other manufacturers has an approximate volume of 15.5 meters cubed and a work volume of approximately 0.06 meters cubed - a ratio of almost 260 to 1. I was curious how this compared to machine tools in general meaning - do we always need that big of a machine to make small parts? (The NT1000 is designed for precision machining for medical devices, automotive hardware, watches, instrumentation, etc.)

A few years back I had a visitor in my laboratory from Doshisha University in Japan. Professor Hirogaki was working on "downsizing" machine tools and presented some interesting data on what is "typical" in the machine tool industry - but he measured the relationship between the weight ratio (machine weight to removal weight) as a function of removal weight (or mass actually). The figure below, from Professor Hiragaki, shows some typical results (again you'll need to click on this for details).

Here, the "target" is a weight ratio of 1 which we approach as the machine size increases. So this would suggest that bigger machines are closer to "perfection."

Interestingly, if we plot the similar ratio for the multi-function machine we've been discussing, the data fits this graph nicely (down in the lower left of the x-axis). The machine mass is given as 8000 kg and the equivalent steel workpiece volume (removal volume) is about 470 kg for a ratio of machine mass to work volume mass of 17. But, and this is a big but, the multi-function machine replaces about 3 equivalently sized machine tools. So, by this "buy to fly" comparison - it looks quite good.

Others are working in micro-sized machines to make micro-sized parts to address this "why do we need a big machine for small parts?" issue. I was curious about how they match up. One leading company, Microlution sells a machine (the 363S CNC 3 axis horizontal mill) with a working volume 2x2x2 in (or 5x5x5 cm - roughly) in a machine volume of 24x24x54 in (or 61x61x137 cm). Volumetrically, this yields a ratio of machine volume to work volume of, gulp, almost 3900. I did not do the mass ratio to see where this fits into Professor Hirogaki's curve.

Recall that the "conventional" multi-function machine tool above had a volume ratio of 260 to 1.

So, there are limits to using these type of calculations perhaps. Trying to make machines the size of the work volume (the "target" ratio of 1 in Hirogaki's figure) may not be feasible for small footprint machines. The trick is ... how to make larger parts with small features on the small machines?

Finally, lest we beat up on ourselves in the machining business too much, let's look again at microelectronics. In 2002, researchers Eric Williams and colleagues published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology on the "1.7kg microchip: energy and material use in the production of semiconductor devices" The chip, a 32MB DRAM chip with a mass of about 2 grams, requires a total weight of secondary fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce it and use it estimated to be 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. This is a buy to fly ratio coming of 835. They also consider the use of water and elemental gases (mainly N2) in the fabrication stage which are 32000 and 700 g per chip, respectively. Using only those water and gas fabrication numbers gives us a buy to fly ratio of 8175 - a new high!

This points out the need for considering some additional ways to measure our "degree of perfection." That is the perfect transition to our discussion of exergy next time in part 3 of this series!

By the way, this posting is our one year anniversary of the blog. Happy Anniversary! We started this blog last July 15th and, thanks to your reading and feedback, it has been a great year. Thanks for following!

Degrees of Perfection

2010-07-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

Part I of a series

Enough with the personal life analysis and reflections on sustainability - let's get back to techy stuff!

I know I said in the last posting that this time we'll look at how some industries are doing and guidelines/strategies they are using to move up on the "sustain-o-meter." Well, let's start this process by another type of self examination - dealing with the "degree of perfection" for manufacturing.

This discussion is going to take a few postings so we'll do this as a series starting, today, with one way to look at performance and some examples.

This term "degree of perfection" comes, originally, from a 1988 book by Jan Szargut and colleagues (Exergy Analysis of Thermal Chemical and Metallurgical Processes, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1988 - Amazon has it!). We'll get to exergy later. But, first, perfection!

The term "degree of perfection" is a ratio of useful products to inputs. The most recent discussion I read that referred to this was a paper by a clever person I've referred to before, Tim Gutowski at MIT, and others, in Env. Sci. Technology on "Thermodynamic Analysis of Resources used in Manufacturing Processes."

This term is used in a variety of ways and sort of represents a manufacturing "bang for the buck" measure. But before we delve into the thermodynamic aspects of this, let's look at conventional measures.

One of the more novel uses is in the aerospace industry where it is called "buy to fly ratio." Boeing, for example, has a long history of tracking this value. Due to the peculiar requirements of aircraft components (demanding precision, unique shapes, incredible strength and fatigue requirements, etc.) many structural components (from wing spars to ribs) and many other parts, like landing gear, are machined out of large blocks of material. This results in most of the material going to waste. Buy to fly ratios in the 30's are common. This means, only a bit over 3% of the material purchased actually ends up on the plane. This waste for machined components is usually in the form of chips - which are recycled of course but discarded never-the-less.

In fact, some postings ago I referred to the role of precision in sustainable manufacturing under the topic of "Little things matter". I stated that if the machining process used in aircraft production is under control and precision manufacturing principles applied, a reduction in machining tolerances from +/- 0.006 inches to +/- 0.004 inches on the features of the airframe can account for a weight reduction of 10,000 pounds/aircraft and substantial fuel savings (8%). This allows an increase of 10% in passengers (engines don't need to carry as much plane), and substantial reduction in manufacturing cost of the aircraft (less material and improved assembly). That reduces the need for the original material (one can spec the rough material tighter if the machining tolerances are better controlled) but that will only reduce the waste slightly.

Recent trends in material costs, production time (even if you throw the chips away you have to machine them in the first place) and performance have allowed aerospace companies to focus on this more. Switching to other materials, like high strength titanium, allows reduced part size with similar strength or other performance.

Switching to other production methods (beside machining away most of the material) such as laser welding of complex rib components can make huge savings. Using laser welding to produce a rib component that had previously been machined resulted in a reduction in the buy-to-fly ratio from 30:1 to 3:1 (see article).

Ditto for use of carbon fibers. But in this case, the concern is how to better reuse the fibers or replace processes that generate so much scrap. A recent article in Plastics Today discusses Boeing's recent efforts to find secondary outlets for carbon fibers reclaimed from aircraft production. The article states "For its purposes, Boeing is buying the highest grades of carbon fibers available: AS4, IM7, T8005, which can cost anywhere from $5-$50/lb as virgin materials. Of the amount it buys however, much of it ends up as scrap ... the buy-to-fly ratio for materials is less than 33%, meaning that 2/3 end up as production waste."

And to make matters worse, the fibers are usually encased in an epoxy matrix which requires processing to remove them.

So, what would you do if you were paying $50/pound for raw materials and then threw away 2/3's in your manufacturing process? Just so we don't forget that this is an not easy task, recall that a typical Boeing 737 has about 367,000 parts and even an average car as about 15,000 parts. So, we are not talking about toothpick production here.

And, we need to consider all the peripheral "stuff" associated with a product. Planes are delivered "au natural" if you will. But electronics, appliances, clothing, food, etc. is usually packaged (and sometimes several times for transport to distribution centers before it gets to the shelf) and that is part of the "buy to fly" ratio for conventional products.

Point made on the need to measure and track degree of perfection and manufacturing performance!

But, the original concept of degree of perfection does not speak specifically to material use ratios but useful output in terms of energy compared to input energy. The term used is exergy - a term you should have heard if you went to engineering school and took a thermodynamics course and may remember or - if you had a good physics course in high school.

Next time we will dive deeper into exergy and the concept of available energy and useful work. This forms an interesting basis for measuring the performance of manufacturing processes and material conversion/transformation and could allow us to look at the potential for greening and process improvement in a new way. This could be a better way to evaluate alternate technology.

Individually green

2010-06-24T14:28:00.000-07:00

The "sustain-o-meter" discussion last posting got a number of good comments and got me thinking about how this might apply to individuals and their living habits.

Actually, to be fair, I was sort of thinking about this but then saw an article on GreenBiz.com by Joel Makover posted on June 17th titled "Who's the Biggest Greenwasher of Them All?" The article discusses the statements of major corporations indicating their commitment and accomplishments in creating green business and the degree of skepticism that we often associate with these statements. The article asks, basically, if this level of scrutiny was applied to consumers (yep, you and me) would we be able to show that we've stepped up to the plate and made significant changes in commitment or documented accomplishments towards "greening" our lives.

After all, the products these companies manufacture and sell are bought by someone. Are consumers stepping up in choosing to embrace sustainability and green behavior?

Gulp. Apparently not.

Mr. Makover refers to "anonymous polls and surveys in which high percentages of consumers make boastful claims -- saying they regularly seek out green products, recycle and compost at home, are more energy conscious in their purchasing decisions, switch brands in favor of greener ones, take public transportation whenever possible, invest their money with so-called responsible funds and companies, and otherwise take action on behalf of the planet."

But, truth be known, the reality is different. Mr. Makover states that "Shoppers overwhelmingly buy what they want, most likely the same things they've always bought, perhaps with an exception or two. Except during brief periods of high fuel prices, they drive what they've always driven with little regard for alternatives. Despite 20 years of green consumer surveys suggesting otherwise, people haven't changed their shopping habits much."

And I've heard anecdotal evidence to support this regarding the tremendous differences noted when surveying consumers on their purchase preferences on entering a major "big box" retailer and then reviewing what they actually bought on exit.

Mr. Makover does also balance these comments with companies who have shown clear evidence of greenwashing in the past - so he levels the complaint equally. But, he says "If consumers were a corporation, we'd be boycotting them."

(Note: If you are interested in more on the topic of greenwashing, the posting of last July 30th covered some definitions and links to sites for reviewing examples from advertising.)

But back to the "sustain-o-meter." Although this was designed with a "corporate" context in mind, it can apply to individuals. For example, you can do a global search and replace for:

- "customers" to be replaced with "vendors" as in "engaging supply chain and vendors"
- "implement" to be replaced with "purchase or install" as in "define and purchase or install" tech wedges for more challenging problems"
- "manufacturing" to be replaced with "purchasing" as in "proactive sustainable purchasing," and
- "design" to be replaced with "living" as in "proactive living for sustainability"

and add this to the meter and this gives some better rating bases for individuals.

I have to honestly say that I'd place myself at the mid-point of the scale - somewhere between "defining solution wedges for low hanging fruit" and "define and install." Meaning, I've done things like: changed all the incandescent bulbs to compact flourescent, installed a digital thermostat for changing the heating periods in my house (and shutting of the furnace at night), and installed a very efficient gas furnace (no chimney ... just blows out water vapor through a PVC tube!).

Oh, yes, and my brother got me a "kill-a-watt" meter for my birthday last year so I can see what my appliances are doing. That's "measuring and tracking performance."

But, you can also check on what your appliances are up to at a neat-o GE website for "Visualizing your gadgets' energy thirst." Did you know 1 kWh of electricity will make 36 pieces of toast in a toaster but 100 pieces in a toaster oven? Or print 1,333 pages on a printer? You could spend hours checking things out on this site. But, be careful - you only get 7 hours of computer monitor use for a kilowatt!

Where would you rate yourself on the "sustain-o-meter"?

Next time we'll look at how some industries are doing and guidelines/strategies they are using to move up on the "sustain-o-meter."

How are we doing?

2010-06-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

One thing I was reminded of while traveling recently is the wide range of "awareness" to the many aspects of green and sustainable living. Even in small motels in remotest parts of Nevada (and believe me ... there are some remote parts!) you can see signs about the management's concern for the environment and to please reuse the towels.

This example, plus smaller plastic caps on disposable water bottles (to make you feel less guilty about drinking water from a plastic bottle that you will, hopefully, place in a recyclable bin and hope will actually be recycled), as well as use of recycled non-potable water for gardening and bathroom fixtures in the Grand Canyon, show that something is catching on.

You may remember my "Everett and Jones philosophy" cited some blogs ago. Recall that? Basically there are three types of people in the world-

- those that make things happen,
- those that watch things happen, and
- those that say 'what happened?'"!

So ... we are making the third slice of the pie, hopefully, smaller.

This motivates me to propose a "sustain-o-meter" to allow the tracking of efforts toward green and sustainable living. This can be applied as well to the topic of this blog and we'll look into some current programs seriously addressing green and sustainable manufacturing in a bit.

But first the "sustain-o-meter." If you do a google search of this term you get a number of hits, including a reference to forest sustainability, Unity College sustainability monitor, and another one from "Professor Planet" on the sustainability of ideas and complete with an explanation of the "three finger sustainability" salute (don't worry - you can use it in public!). So, I am not first...but I am trying to be a bit more "quantitative" in the meter readings to allow more detail. Well, you be the judge.

My version of the sustain-o-meter tries to gauge the seriousness of an organization's commitment and actions. It is based on my reading and review of lots of information on real, or imagined, activity and ranges from "eco-chic" styling of designer pants (organic cotton!) to totally zero waste, sustainable design and renewable resource companies.

The proposed "meter" is shown below with measures ranging from denial and indifference on one end to serious and effective on the other. I've tried to put stages of development of programs and systems

leading towards a sustainable enterprise. And, you will likely need to click on the image to read the details.

I am sure I will have missed something and the meter coverage does venture outside of my comfort zone of green and sustainable manufacturing. But, it accommodates a lot of what we've been discussing here.

The "steps to enlightenment" on the meter are:

- denial
- indifference
- "poking around" for someone else to pay for improvement
- outsourcing the problem
- asking smart questions and benchmarking (could be two categories here)
- measuring and tracking performance (with green metrics)
- engaging supply chain and customers (in identifying the challenges and potential solutions)
- defining solution "wedges" for low hanging fruit (see wedges below)
- define and implement technology wedges for more challenging problems (and recall the definition of technology wedges)
- proactive sustainable manufacturing (design/construction of manufacturing processes, machines and systems for sustainable production)
- proactive design for sustainability (for products)
- serious and effective

Sort of "Dornfeld's 12 steps to sustainable manufacturing."

The lower ratings on the left side would represent the "what happened?" zone of our Everett and Jones philosophy. The mid ratings, from "measuring and tracking" to "define solution wedges for low hanging fruit" would be typical of steps for greening manufacturing. These are sort of in the "watch things happen" although, frankly, that is a bit of an understatement. Finally, the right end, from "define and implement technology wedges for more challenging problems" to "proactive design for sustainability" is definitely in the "make things happen" category.

Next time we'll put some "meat" on the scale levels as an examples of what organizations are doing.

I also encourage you to think about this scale and a few examples of companies, organizations, or other enterprises and where they might fit into the scale. Send me a note if you think you've got some good measures!

Partnership for Sustainable Manufacturing

2010-06-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Or ... "You are either part of the solution or part of the problem."

Today I am using the posting to introduce the Sustainable Manufacturing Partnership (SMP) in the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS) at UC Berkeley. Please forgive me if this sounds like an advertisement - it is, sort of, but for noble purposes!

First, a few notes and comments. The second line in the heading of today's posting is actually a quote from Eldridge Cleaver. Mr. Cleaver was not known as an environmentalist but was considered, by many, to be an effective activist for sure! As a student at Madison in the late 60's I certainly saw many photos/posters of him for causes that seemed urgent at the time.

While searching for the source of that quote I came across two others related to the environment and sustainability I'd like to share:

“Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites." (William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990; he was the first EPA Adminstrator, (1970-1973 and 1983-1985).)

Or, another one more apropos to the situation in the Gulf of Mexico attributed to Calvin:
"That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV." Bill Watterson, Something under the bed is drooling, 1988. (Calvin is a character in the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip by Mr. Watterson.)

Now ... onto the SMP.

I have given several presentations on the challenges and opportunities associated with green manufacturing (and you can download one from LMAS website). I generally start with the "opportunities" and include the following:

• All future energy, transport, medical/health, life style, dwelling, defense and food/water supply systems based on increasingly precise elements and components - hence manufacturing, to be specific, precision or high quality manufacturing, is critical to the future.

• Manufacturing for an energy and environmentally aware consumer (autos, consumer products, buildings, etc.) will become increasingly important. And this will require major shifts in the way we manufacture in terms of materials used, processes and systems.

• Manufacturing alternate energy supply systems. This will also require major shifts in the way we manufacture in terms of materials used, processes and systems - specially if we'd like the US to be a player in this arena.

• Machine tools using less energy, materials, and space will require substantial innovation in design, manufacture, and operation of these "mother machines" (meaning the producing machinery for all other machines and systems).

• Efficient factory operation will insure the green machines will operate in environments as green.

• The "opportunity" to comply with government regulations. This sounds like an academics view of big government but to insure level playing fields and to be responsive to global trends this can be a competitive driver if used constructively. Remember the tragedy of the commons?!

In the presentation the last conclusions slide, by way of summarizing all the neato stuff presented, includes the following statements:

• Energy, green manufacturing and related issues are a big opportunity for industry/manufacturing
- new products/services/market leadership
- better overall performance/lower CoO
- more competitive, reduce risk
- take advantage of growing regulatory environment

• This requires careful analysis and development of metrics and analytical tools

• Including energy and green manufacturing aspects can be part of a successful sustainable business strategy

• The problem is too large for individual companies to solve - must be a cooperative effort among industry, associations, researchers, government

It is that last statement that drives the creation of the Sustainable Manufacturing Partnership (or SMP). We have a url- smp.berkeley.edu (although at this time it simply links to the LMAS website). This will be updated as more information becomes available. It takes a team of organizations to make real progress.

The SMP will operate as a consortium of partners. The idea is that, referring to the second summary statement above on the need for "careful analysis and development of metrics and analytical tools", working with partners on specific industry focused problems, these analyses and tools can be created to allow engineers to incorporate green metrics and analyses in all their work on materlal selection, machine design and operation, systems, layout of facilities, operation of these systems and facilities and, ideally, all the way up to the supply chain. And, of course, smart undergrad and graduate students play a critical role in this - each will tackle a problem area. This insures they are familiarized with the problems and solutions as part of their education but, as well, is a terrific attractor of students.

We are just kicking this off and have several partners already on board or in discussion. These partners cover a range of technologies and industries from basic manufacturing (i.e. "heavy iron") to more specialized manufacturing for aerospace and semiconductor. All fit the definition of "precision manufacturing." We hope to include, as well, folks who can embed these analytical tools into more conventional design software - then the real impact can be driven throughout industry practice.

There is a fee for the partnership of course - got to feed the grad students. But there will also be a mechanism for participation by interested parties who may have something to contribute in other ways.

There will be more to come on this in future postings. If you have interest - please send me an e-mail at dornfeld@berkeley.edu.

Oh, and we had a great vacation touring the US Southwest (National Parks - Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Mesa Verde, plus Santa Fe, etc.) And, if you are ever in Durango Colorado be sure to ride the steam train from Durango to Silverton; smoke, steam, whistles, deep canyons, the works - an amazing combination of engineering and nature.)

Don't ask, don't tell

2010-05-19T23:20:00.000-07:00

Or when we throw stuff away...where is away?

One of the known unknowns (from our discussion of Rumsfeld's definition of knowledge in the last posting) is where waste goes. We all put our recycling out on the curb every week with our trash and, magically, it disappears. We feel a great sense of accomplishment when all the plastic (except for some types), cardboard, glass and cans head off to rejoin the material stream somewhere else. Or so we hope.

And we pay for this good feeling as part of our refuse fee.

But, if we have a goal of "zero waste", can we actually achieve this?

Waste has been a target of manufacturing improvement for some time. Henry Ford had as a major organizational philosophy the reduction of waste, scrap, over production, etc. since this all cost him money (materials) and wasted effort. This was discussed in one of the first postings for this blog back on July 27th 2009.

I noted that Henry Ford said over 80 years ago in his book "Today and Tomorrow" (1926) that "we will not so lightly waste material simply because we can reclaim it— for salvage involves labour. The ideal is to have nothing to salvage." Very green thinking for the time - but motivated less by the environmental concerns than a realization that waste is the result of inefficiencies in the conversion of materials to product and to be avoided.

The October 7th 2009 posting talked about the Toyota Production System (TPS) and the "original seven wastes." These were:

   1. Overproducing.
   2. Wasting time waiting.
   3. Transporting.
   4. Over-processing.
   5. Excess Inventory (WIP).
   6. Excess motion of workers, including lack of ergonomics.
   7. Scrap and rework.

These all add unnecessary time, material, resources and, ultimately, energy to manufacturing. Henry Ford would have agreed.

More recently, in 2008, Toyota announced a zero emissions goal for their production of vehicles.

In the last posting I mentioned Sony's Green Management 2015 initiative and their "Road to Zero". This includes a target of "Increase of waste recycle ratio to 99% or more" by April 2011.

GM has also announced a plan for zero waste at half of its plants (meaning 62 manufacturing facilities representing 43% of its global production). The aim is to no longer send any production waste to landfills.

If you "google" zero waste your screen lights up with other examples.

To achieve this requires efforts way beyond TPS 7 wastes or, at least, extending the definition of production to a wider set of process elements - like packaging used in transporting parts, sludge from recovery of waste materials, symbiosis with other parts of the production facility or enterprise for reuse of materials. It also includes incineration of a lot of stuff. If it is zero waste to the landfill then a lot of solutions will technically fit the need but, environmentally, not necessarily be a positive step.

It comes back to the question of where stuff goes when we dispose of it and, if we don't dispose of it, what we actually do with it - assuming we have not completely eliminated it from our process or supply chain.

Let me relate to you an interesting example of "zero waste" and "where does it go." I attended a technical conference in the midwest last week. The major focus was on retaining manufacturing capacity in the US, and extending US manufacturing into new areas/markets. One part of the program was on sustainable manufacturing and the opportunities offered in "green manufacturing". Most of my comments would have seemed familiar to you if you've been following this blog.

During one of the coffee breaks I was talking with an old friend who works at a major multinational corporation. He is one of those clever manufacturing engineers who helps to develop new manufacturing technology for production - all the way from buying machine tools to setting up production lines to tuning lines for top performance in the face of material or product variation. The kind of person who makes manufacturing hum.

His company has embarked on a zero waste initiative. So there is an attempt to reduce the amount of "non-product" moving into and out of their production facilities. He told me that, with respect to a precision assembly that they use in some of their products, he was trying to track down contamination that seemed to be responsible for some malfunctions on the finished product or, at least, requiring additional cleaning before installation to insure no malfunction. More and more "common" products are now dependent on incredibly tight tolerances for performance so any contamination can, like in the semiconductor industry, cause part failure or malfunction.

As they were doing a value stream mapping (VSM) exercise (see the Nov. 18, 2009 post for details on VSM) to see where this part goes as it moves from the outside supply chain into the production facility, they noticed a step in the process chain consisting of an additional outside facility, not part of the company. On further investigation, they discovered that this precision assembly was shipped from the supplier to an intermediary where the part was taken out of the protective packaging (disposable packaging) and put into reusable tubs (unprotected) for transport into the production facility and to the assembly line.

This "clever move" insured that no disposable packaging material entered the factory (and subsequently had to be disposed of) and only the reusable tubs circulated into and out of the factory. No waste - at least for that part and the assembly line. The "transfer" done at the outside facility had to deal with the packaging waste of course. But that was another company.

It didn't seem as if anyone was considering the increased handling, contamination, inventory (many of the TPS wastes listed above) in the drive for zero waste here.

And, of course, all the multinational had done was "outsourced" the waste to some other entity for this particular part of the manufacturing process.

Two steps forward - one step back.

(Green-manufacturing blog is going to take a 2 week hiatus for vacation - back again in early June!)

Rumsfeldian Insight

2010-05-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

Or, what we don't know about our supply chain can hurt us.

In our discussion in the last posting we were trolling in the tumultuous waters of carbon offsets trying to find a way to balance a need, for some, to do something about their carbon footprint while at the same time not getting completely ripped off by some eco-scam.

There is never enough information. There are things that we know. There are things we don't know.

Wait ... rather than trying to explain the vagaries of information myself, let me refer to a master - former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. You may recall his statement about what we know and don't know. He was roundly lampooned for the comment but, if you look at it, he defined very nicely the world we live in (and, have to deal with).

Here is what he said (from a Department of Defense news briefing on February 12, 2002):

“As we know, there are known knowns.
These are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say - we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns … the ones we
don't know we don't know.”

I refer to this in my class as "the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld"! But, in fairness, he hit the nail on the head.

It's the third category that is the most troublesome when it comes to working towards greening manufacturing.

A recent comment from a reader referred to our discussion on "sustainability angst" as related to the tremendous variety of supply chains. The comment was substantially "[T]he question then becomes one of not are people willing to achieve this program of "Green" Manufacturing principles but, how [to] employ these strategies? [I]n order to have ... true Green principles we must understand a couple of things ... about the products that are being manufactured and each Supply Chain is always supremely different. So, how do we mitigate the variances from Supply Chain to Supply Chain?"

Let me start to address this concern. I am sure the question will not be completely answered as much of it falls into Rummy's third category. And we will continue this discussion in future postings I am sure.

Many of these variance are understood but not quantified (meaning we can't put a real number on their significance or potential impact.) Other variances (and worse, missing links or information or sources) fits squarely in Rumsfeld's third category.

Let me give an example (and some of you may be familiar with this one) of how the third category can spring to the fore in unfortunate ways. This was first brought to my attention by Dani Tsuda, a consultant with WSP Environmental, who lectures to my class from time to time on regulatory issues and product design.

Just before Christmas, 2001, (in October to be exact) Sony was stunned to learn that nearly 1.3 million of its PlayStation 1 game machines had been stopped at the point of import in the Netherlands by Dutch customs agents due to higher than allowed levels of cadmium in the cables. This was widely reported in the press. The cadmium level was on the order of 20x the maximum allowed for consumer products. The cadmium had been used as a stabilizer or coloring agent in plastic coating on the cables by someone in Sony's supply chain.

The seizure of the PlayStations, the recall, replacement of parts, and other costs, ultimately cost Sony in excess of 160 million Euros (Impact on Sales: EUR 110M and on operating profit: EUR 52M). And, if you track the Euro, that's way more than 160 million dollars.

The incident also lead impetus to the development of reduction of hazardous substances (ROHS) regulations in the EU.

Remember, this hazardous material was not in a core component of the play station electronics that was key to the performance - like a video processor or memory. This was the plastic on the cable to connect the console to your TV or other display. It could have been the electrical cord on your Forman Grill for all that matters - it had too much cadmium in it. Who knew they used cadmium to stabilize colors in plastics?!

And who knew the Dutch would be checking? Apparently the regulation was specific to the Netherlands but was going to be incorporated in the EU regulations to come out a bit later. What if they had imported these games through another country? Might have been a different story. But, chance should not play a role in green supply chain management.

Not surprisingly, Sony "went ballistic." Today, Sony has one of the most restricted vendor/supplier material programs in the world. They have established a very structured "Green Partner Program" which employs a "Green Partner Environmental Quality Approval Program" which includes standard practices and requirements, audit procedures, new parts approval with comprehensive listing of materials (specially those with any restricted concentrations), and a change control methodology. An illustration of the program is shown below (from the Green Partner link above).

The idea is to insure "'clean' raw material - 'clean' process - 'clean' product." In other words - no surprises.

Now, I will be first to admit that Sony is a huge corporation with extensive leverage in the market with its suppliers and tremendous resources to put towards managing its supply chain. But, it still got caught in this one. So, size may help with the solution but it won't necessarily help when "you don't know what you don't know."

Let me follow Sony developments after this disaster a bit more.

Recently Sony came out with its "Green Management 2015" announcement and program. From the report, Sony states:

"Sony has continuously provided people with a vast array of products, services and
entertainment. Such corporate activities are only possible if the global environment, which sustains all life on earth, is healthy. We must address such environmental issues as climate change, resource exhaustion and the need for effective management of chemical substances both as risks to business continuity and as business opportunities.

"Taking these sentiments into account, we have set forth the Sony Group Environmental Vision, the goal of which is a 'zero environmental footprint,' that is, reduction of the environmental footprint of our corporate activities and of every Sony product throughout its life cycle to zero, and we continue to pursue a wide range of related initiatives. We will strive to achieve this by 2050."

Their first steps in this goal are set out in the Green Management 2015 document and refer to early term goals.

Let me reiterate the key point here - reduction of every Sony product's environmental impact throughout its life cycle to zero.

Wow! Can they do that? It will be interesting to watch. They are serious, smart and confronting the challenge head on.

Another statement in the report is a bold admission by any company let alone one the size of Sony. "At present, every Sony product negatively affects the environment to some degree throughout its life cycle or at different stages thereof."

To be successful they will need to reduce the variability of their manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain operations to minimize Rumsfeld's third category. And come up with ways to measure their product's impacts across the lifecycle

I wish them success. Who's next?

(More to come on smaller company efforts in the future.)

Carbon Footprint Hangover

2010-05-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

In the last posting we went over our recent methodology and calculation for assessing my lab's carbon footprint and purchasing the carbon credits to "offset" our impact. I mentioned that there are some sites that offer helpful comparisons to a number of sources of carbon credits and that there are some attempts to certify the validity of the offering organizations.

Most of the sources of carbon credits indicate what the funds are used for - for example renewable energy, efficiency, reforestation. The site I referred to for comparison mentioned that there are a number of other categories of carbon credit sources that are not certified.

There is more! In fact, the "carbon credit market" is a bit like the wild west or the derivatives market ... you pay your money and you take your chances.

First, some background based on my observations and research.

Carbon credits should be purchased by individuals or companies wanting to offset their impact, measured by carbon equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions or other sources. Last week I showed how we calculated our lab's footprint and what we included, what we did not, how we converted and what the final number was. I also said that we were purchasing our carbon credits from Carbonfund.org. I felt then, and still do, that this is a responsible source and that I am getting what I paid for.

When you buy carbon credits, you should look for at least the following information from the source:

1) specifics on where and what the funds will be used for in terms of carbon offsets; you'd like to about the assets being purchased; like, know where the forest is, or wind mills are, or other asset that contributes the carbon offset you are getting for your money.
2) how is the carbon offset calculated? How much GHG/unit of whatever they are promising to buy or conserve on your behalf.
3) how much of your funds actually go to the offset promised in 1 and 2 above?
4) how long will the asset last? (CO2 will stay in the atmosphere around 100 years I understand. If you buy some trees to offset your carbon, and the trees grow for 20 years and then get cut down, that's a problem.)
5) is this a "future tense" promise or "past tense" assertion? Apparently, many of the carbon offset schemes are rather speculative in terms of timing, delivery and impact. (More on this when we discuss a recent news article targeting this.)
6) is there any track record of success with this organization?
7) is "everybody happy" about this or are the folks whose land got confiscated to put up the windmills (and are now unable to support their basic lifestyle) standing when the music stops?!
8) is this "new" carbon reduction and not just something that is going to occur anyways or has it been going on for some time and now relabeled as "carbon reduction?" For example, if you offer 'not to cut down trees' as your carbon offset asset but the trees are on protected lands that were never to be cut anyways, is that a net gain for the environment?

There are likely a few more but this is a good start.

Some time ago I was going to do something different for my brother on his birthday. Rather than get him a conventional present I thought I'd adopt a whale in his name. I had seen an ad in a magazine for an organization that was working to stabilize the whale population and it seemed like a good idea. Then the vision of a postcard picture of the wide blue sea came to mind with an arrow pointing to the water and a label "your whale here" popped into my head. I realized that, as great as this sounded, I really did not have any idea whether my few bucks were going to help anything remotely close to the ocean, let along a whale. I thought better of it and settled for something more practical.

Apparently carbon offset credits can be a bit like this.

I recently read an excellent article (global report) in the Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2010, titled "Blowing smoke?" The article, the result of a 4 month multimedia investigation by reporters on five continents, was a joint project of the Monitor and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at BU (http://necir-bu.org/wp/). There are links to the story on the Center's website (http://necir-bu.org/wp/?page_id=1882Z) or you can read the text and watch video material at the Monitor site (http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbon-offsets-may-ease-eco-guilt-but-not-global-warming; video at http://www.csmonitor.com/multimedia/video/Buyer-Beware-Empty-Air). The article gives an excellent overview of the concept and motivation for carbon credit purchases and then dives deep into some of the issues surrounding their offer and purchase. They use the term "buyer beware" in the article!

I don't want to parrot the whole article here but it is comprehensive, detailed and offers a very interesting view into this "business." It cites examples of green entrepreneurs (in some cases essentially scam artists with a new version of "property in Florida") offering, on one end, the Vatican a forest in Hungary to offset the Holy See's carbon footprint, to some proposing to dump tons of iron filings in the ocean to spur plankton growth (and hence consume CO2; there were some regulatory concerns about this and, also, this had not been scientifically evaluated), to an organization that's been planting trees for decades suddenly offering the process as carbon credits. There are details on native inhabitants being inconvenienced/impacted negatively by some of the proposed plans. Most individuals/organizations featured in the article were not able to meet the requirements I listed earlier.

The article also offers some helpful discussion on the certification process and mentions the Voluntary Carbon Standard (http://www.v-c-s.org/), Plan Vivo (http://www.planvivo.org/; and this one has a photo of smiling indigenous people on its website so must be good!) and Gold Standard (http://www.cdmgoldstandard.org/) as independent organizations for certification. They seem to be legit (but I can make no assurances one way or the other on this from my own work!).

The last one, Gold Standard, has a link to a report on "The Carbon Management and Offsetting Trends Survey Results 2009" on its site (see http://www.cdmgoldstandard.org/fileadmin/editors/files/2_news/market_trends_and_forecasts/EcoSecurities_Carbon_Management_and_Offsetting_Survey_2009.pdf). The report summarizes the attitudes of a large number of industries across many sectors towards carbon offsets, what factors motivate companies to purchase carbon offsets and what the "carbon industry" needs to do to further stimulate the market.

Carbonfund.org, the organization we bought our carbon credits from, is listed as the 4th of 15 most recognized sources of carbon credits in this report.

So, I still feel good. But you should read this article in the Monitor - it is good and enlightening.

But, now I'm thinking, if someone donated funds to my laboratory at UC for research on manufacturing process improvement or replacement (one of my "technology wedges" ideas maybe?) and we calculated how much greenhouse gas this would offset over the life of the technology, could the funds provider claim this as carbon offset?

It'd be new, verifiable (trust me!), we've a great track record, no one will be unhappy about this (trust me again - I'll even let you talk to the grad students), and we promise, minus a small overhead that goes back to the Governator, to convert your funds into technology - sounds like a good deal.

Maybe I'm onto something here!

Earth Day and Carbon Offset Credits

2010-04-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

I promised more tech talk in the end of last week's posting. This will be "tech-lite"!

Earth day has come and gone and, judging by the amount of coverage all things green are getting (from consumer products to industrial and enterprise practice), things are looking up for good ol' Mother Earth. Of course, we all know someone who got stuck in Europe by the big belch of a volcano in Iceland ... so we will never be quite as clever about all this as we think.

We just completed a calculation of our lab's carbon footprint and will now buy carbon offsets for that amount as part of our efforts to "incentivize" ourselves to reduce our footprint. Of course, the actual control we have in our lab, comprised of some rooms in the first floor of a six story building (with one big on-off switch for the HVAC that we cannot control) sitting on a campus with one large power meter measuring the campus energy, seems small on first glance. But, we do travel, use lights and machinery, buy consumables for experiments, so we are not without some ability to change our impact.

In the August 10th, 2009 posting (see http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/08/whats-your-footprint.html) we had an extensive discussion about footprints and some on-line tools for calculating them. Our strategy for calculating our lab's footprint is more analytical.

We presented a scenario of how we do these calculations and why at a recent campus open house for the public and I will summarize this here. Josh Chien, one of the researchers in the lab, worked this up. (I gave a link to a you-tube video of his presentation with all the details in the last posting - see http://lmas.berkeley.edu/public/?p=1266; narrated by his girlfriend!). I will be quick to acknowledge that our lab (a few thousand square feet of space, some 20 researchers (and their travel), a couple of nice machine tools and other processing hardware, computers, instruments, espresso machine, desks and furniture, computer projector, etc.) is not Wal-Mart. But it is probably close to a large number of small businesses. This is more like the calculation a "department" in a large corporation would do. We did not include our share of the general campus infrastructure we use in our daily operation.

We define carbon footprint as a collective measure of one’s environmental impact, in particular, direct and indirect greenhouse gases (GHG) produced from creating and sustaining human activity; typically, represented as global warming potential (GWP) with units of metric tonnes (or kg) of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e).

We calculated this using a hybrid economic input-output life cycle analysis (EIOLCA). I discussed this approach in a recent posting (http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2010/01/low-hanging-fruit-4.html) and we applied it to a manufacturing example in the last of the greening the supply chain postings two weeks ago.

The hybrid-LCA approach was used to determine our carbon footprint with respect to four sectors:
- embodied energy (lab equipment and food)
- electrical energy (direct emissions from our local utility, PG&E)
- steam energy (lab heating and hot water)
- transportation (commuting to lab and business trips)

The EIOLCA GWP database by Carnegie Mellon University is a source for data that represents U.S. average, see www.eiolca.net for an excellent discussion and data source.

Now for some details.

Embodied energy refers to the energy and resources consumed during the raw material extraction, manufacturing and transportation phase of a product - the output is indirect GHG emissions measured in MTCO2e, or embedded GWP for an item. This can be calculated as: item cost ($year) × EIOLCAGWP (MTCO2e/$year) = GWPembd (MTCO2e). For example, for the desks in our lab

Electrical energy refers to the power consumption of a product during its use phase - the output is indirect GHG emissions measured in MTCO2e. This can be calculated as: power (kWh) × Costelec ($/kWh) × EIOLCAGWP (MTCO2e/$) = GWPelec (MTCO2e)

or, if the mix of your local utility is known,
power (kWh) × GWPPG&E (kgCO2e/kWh) = GWPelec (MTCO2e). For example,

Steam energy refers to the energy required to generate steam for heating and producing hot water - the output is indirect GHG emissions measured in MTCO2e. We can calculate this for our building and then, lacking any more specific data, apportion it to our lab based on our percentage of the floor space in the building.

Finally, transportation refers to the energy required for a transportation mode - the output is direct GHG emissions measured in MTCO2e. This is calculated, for land travel (none of us commute by boat!), as mpg × distance (miles) × emission (GWP/mile) × days/year = GWPtrans (MTCO2e).

We use the following conversion factors for land-based transportation (including BART, our local subway):

- gasoline: 8.9 kgCO2e/gal
- diesel: 10.2 kgCO2e/gal
- BART: 0.06 kgCO2e/mi

For air travel, usually to and from conferences and meetings, we use an online calculator from Climatecare (see http://www.jpmorganclimatecare.com/). to estimate the impact of travel. It considers length of travel, etc. Everyone lists their business and commuting related travel for the lab calculation. Not surprisingly ... I am the biggest contributor to this one!

Now for some results. Our total GWP for 2009: 175.43 MTCO2e is comprised of the following amounts from the four components:

- embodied energy: 120.70 MTCO2e
- electrical energy: 15.50 MTCO2e
- steam energy: 2.31 MTCO2e
- transportation: 36.92 MTCO2e

The importance of "location" is brought home in the computation of our electrical energy consumption and it's CO2 equivalent. The figure below shows a comparison of our impact using our "local" utility (with a very renewable mix of energy sources) with the equivalent data from the EIOLCA website referenced above. This EIOLCA data reflects the US average. PG&E uses much cleaner and more renewable energy than the U.S. average.

Clearly, it is a big advantage, in our case, to use the more accurate local data. And, once again, it shows the importance of location in your supply chain impact calculation.

Now, what to do about this? We have chosen to purchase carbon offsets from Carbonfund.org, a leader in providing carbon offsets (www.carbonfund.org), to "offset" out the GHG impact of our lab. Any individual, business or organization can purchase carbon credits, equal to their carbon footprint, thus offsetting their carbon impact and becoming certified carbon neutral.

Carbon credits can be used to help fund renewable energy, reducing overall energy demand, reforestation & avoided deforestation and many more. The assumption, and you need to verify this, is that the money you spend for the credits you purchase goes to the intended purpose of carbon reduction or capture in the amount you paid. This is, to me, an "unregulated" market so one wants to be sure the organization one purchases the credits from has some track record.

in 2007, LMAS became the first UC Berkeley lab to become carbon neutral and offset 415 MTCO2e with carbonfund.org. We missed last year. Our footprint of 175 MTCO2e this year is substantially reduced from the first year we did the calculation. This is due to, primarily, the initial footprint of all the embedded existing hardware, furniture (ie non-consummables) in the lab.

What about the cost? There are many helpful websites comparing the cost, and benefits, of different sources of credits. One good one is http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/carbon_offset_wind_credits_carbon_reduction.htm. On that site you'll see that, for Carbonfund.org, the cost of a one metric ton of CO2 equivalent credit is $10.00. And, importantly, you can see what the funds are used for - in this case Renewables, Efficiency, Reforestation. It also indicates and certification the organization has for its "product".

In the case of Carbonfund, they are certified or verified by Environmental Resources Trust, Climate Community and Biodiversity Standards, Chicago Climate Exchange, UNFCCC JI. The site gives links to the websites of these organizations. Other categories of carbon credit sources, some for which they could not find certification or verification are shown as well. It also says that businesses can often get a "volume discount" or carbon offset credits!

So, whether or not you decide to do this for your organization, it is an interesting exercise. The Carbonfund website has a built in calculator but part of the "fun" is doing it yourself.

I feel better already!

Green Bits

2010-04-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last posting discussing supply chains from a manufacturing and green aspect. Following on these discussions, I wanted to mention an upcoming webinar on "Supply Chain Carbon Mapping in Four Industries" to be presented by Climate Earth on Tuesday, April 20th, at 11 am PDT/ 2 pm EDT (1 hour). There is no cost for the seminar and you can register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/346073969 or go to http://www.climateearth.com/. There is an archived webinar on "Carbon Efficient Supply Chains" at http://www.climateearth.com/webinar_2009_11_18.shtml. The four industries covered are food processing, packaged goods, manufacturing, and services

A recent survey by McKinsey on "How companies manage sustainability" caught my eye. You need to register to download the full report (but it is free) at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_companies_manage_sustainability_McKinsey_Global_Survey_results__2558. The survey was done in February 2010 covering almost 2000 executives in a wide range of industries and locations. Among the results shown is a table showing how companies keep track of the "value created by sustainability programs." Although no detail is given on the programs the results support some of our earlier musings on why green (or sustainable) matters.

The items tracked are:
- reputation building (over half agree this is a key metric)
- growth opportunities
- cost savings
- risk avoidance
- employee attraction, retention and productivity
- customer loyalty

The study also identified "proactive" executives (surprisingly only about 6% say "sustainability is a top-three priority" in their agendas with the associated actions associated with it.) These executives tend to be much more proactive in seeking ways to enhance the sustainability of their organizations. They list the following statistic - "84 percent of respondents at engaged companies are aware of whether or not their companies measure their carbon footprint" and, more importantly, these engaged companies are more likely, with respect to their supply chain and customers, to be keeping track of "relevant sustainability indicators such as waste, energy and water use, and labor standards."

Now to some green technology wedges!

I participated in and spoke at a conference earlier this month in Nashville sponsored by AMT and NCMS - two organizations well engaged with the manufacturing industry in the US. It was called the 2010 AMT/NCMS Manufacturing Technology Forum and the focus was on green manufacturing. You can see some details at http://www.amtonline.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=160249&section_id=268.

I presented an overview of issues and opportunities in green manufacturing (many of them discussed in these postings) and spoke again about the concepts of the technology wedges. I first introduced these in the September 15, 2009 blog (see http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/2009/09/green-manufacturing-technology-wedges.html). I related this concept to specific approaches to reducing energy consumption in manufacturing with examples from machine tool design and operation.

One of the other speakers, Scott Hibbard, Vice President of Technology at Bosch Rexroth in Illinois. Besides being a very sharp engineer in the drive and controller business we both have roots in Wisconsin. He discussed drive & control technology to increase energy efficiency and spoke of many bits of enabling technology for some of the exact applications I have been thinking about in the past. Things such as energy recovery from machines during changeover or down cycles, reduction in "tare" energy for machines, reduction (or increase in efficiency) of process related energy, etc.

He showed the required "what percentage of US consumption my particular area is responsible for" slide derived from Department of Energy data but this time reflecting motors and drives. Turns out about 70% of industrial energy consumption falls in this category. He further broke that category down to specific applications of these motors and drives to include pumps (hydraulic and others) 27%, compressed air systems 18% material movement (also known as motion control - this is used in machine tools, robots, conveyors, etc.) 30%, for example.

Just to make sure we are all on the same page let's define a few terms. Drives (often adjustable speed) is usually a combination of hardware and software that powering and adjusting the operating speed of a mechanical load. This is often an electric motor and a speed controller or power controller. The "drive" often refers to just the controller. In machine tools these motors can be synchronous or induction, AC, DC (brushed or brushless), or step motors and can be rotary or linear motion providers. Try our old friend Wikipedia for a quick source of info. The combination of a motor and drive with some higher level control hardware/software makes up one axis of motion of a modern numerically controlled machine tool as we've discussed them before.

Scott identified 4 major areas for energy savings and, incidentally, increasing productivity:

- Efficient components (use products and systems with optimized efficiencies)
- Energy on demand (only use energy when needed; recall our tare vs process energy discussion a few blogs back)
- energy recovery (store and reuse or sell back excess energy; and we had referred to energy recovery from the spindle of a machine tool also)
- Energy conscious system design (include energy consumption and efficiency in the design of the machine or system from the start)

One of his examples showed 20% regenerative power from "machinery braking" and the return of that power to the electricity utility. "Energy exchange" between motor and generator drive modes is also a possibility with 15% recovery.

One neat example relied on storing of excessive energy not required during short-time operation and intermittent operation by means of hydraulic accumulators and accumulator charging circuits. Without getting into the details, accumulators in hydraulic systems are pressure storage reservoirs containing a hydraulic fluid (considered to be incompressible - meaning doesn't compress under load - most liquids are like this) that is held under pressure by an external source such as a spring, compressed gas (gases do compress under load!), weights or other mechanisms. Using an accumulator, the pump on the hydraulic system need not be as large to accommodate the load variations and, they can store energy! Combine this with a variable speed pump which can use up to 65% less energy thanks to utilization of stand-by mode when idle-running and speed reduction with slower motions.

Scott showed this technology applied to a hydraulic press. These presses are used for forming large sheets of metal as in automotive components like fender, hoods, etc as well as a variety of formed metal products. Think of a giant hydraulic cylinder with a forming tool set (punch and die) and sheets of metal.

The figure below, from Scott's presentation, shows a typical energy use cycle for a hydraulic press. The top figure shows the press cycle with a rapid down motion, the press forming section,

decompression and return of the cylinder (and top die) to top position. The bottom portion compares the energy used over time with the conventional and variable speed pump drive with regeneration. There is a dramatic savings. In addition, since motors generate heat, etc. there will be a reduced building environmental load as well.

We've gotten a little heavy on the tech talk this time. But, it is an excellent example of the potential in operation of our manufacturing machinery to apply wedges that, in combination with a lot of other machine improvements, make big differences. A typical automotive manufacturing press shop will have dozens of these presses operating 24/7 (when production is good of course) and the savings realized on one machine multiplied by all adds up.

More tech stuff next time!

And, for youtube fans, we've posted two videos on our lab website from a recent open house called "Cal Day": one is on how we calculate the carbon footprint of our laboratory and another on a recent experiment showing side by side energy consumption and a milling experiment in the lab. Both are accessible at http://lmas.berkeley.edu/public/?p=1266. Enjoy!