5
Design—
Making It Sustainable
from the Start

The best way to get green is to design green. Every company or enterprise is constantly involved in design. Organizations design innovative products and services and innovative ways to make existing products and to perform existing and new tasks. So green design is a common entry point for companies seeking to become sustainable. This chapter provides guidance on sustainable green design of products and services.

It turns out that proactive green design is much more cost-effective than reactive solutions to environmental challenges. The design Rule of Tens states that if it costs $10 to come up with design criteria, it costs $100 for the actual design, $1,000 for the prototype, $10,000 for the preproduction run, $100,000 to produce the product, and $1 million to recall it after a flaw is discovered that could have been addressed in the $10 design phase.

Review Your LCA

In chapter 4 we discussed the life cycle analysis. The first rule in sustainable design is to review all of the LCA categories. To design a more sustainable product, ask and answer the question, “What improvements can be designed into the product in the preproduction, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, use, and disposal phases as a function of inputs of energy, water, and material, and outputs of emissions to air, releases to water and solid waste, and impacts on human health and ecology?” If you completed an LCA matrix (see resource E), the boxes that are highlighted in red represent the greatest environmental impact. These are the areas to focus on in your green design efforts for the next product iteration.

Qteros is an example of a start-up company that came into existence from intentional green design. Jef Sharp, along with his partners in a string of successful businesses, decided

We wanted to start a new business, but this time we wanted to do a business for the planet. We created criteria for starting green companies that can help the world. We then looked at a lot of opportunities including fuel cells, ethanol fuel injection, energy conservation, solar energy, and green plastics, and we settled on the Q microbe discovered by Dr. Sue Leschine of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She found a microbe near the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts that ate cellulose and produced a very small amount of ethanol.

From the beginning I believed that Sue’s discovery would be a home run. However, had I seen all the trials and tribulations that we would have to go through, I probably would not have even started. We had read that Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines, Records, and Megastores had set up a Green Fuels Fund. We were just three guys in a garage, but we had the chutzpah to make the call, and before you know it, we were on a plane to London and then had terms for a deal from him. Because Branson took us seriously, so did others, and we actually ending up turning down Branson for a better deal.

The better deal eventually resulted in a total of $25 million in funding from BP, Soros Management Fund, Venrock (the “rock” part of this firm’s name comes from the Rockefeller origins of the fund), and Battery Ventures. This paid for development resulting in progress on evolving the Q microbe without use of genetic engineering from its original 0.2 gram of ethanol per liter to over 4 grams per liter, which is the thermodynamic break-even point of more energy out than in.¹

Jef and his partners started with the concept of using a life cycle approach and designing a green business and now have a technology that can convert switch grass, corn stover, wood waste, and now even the solids in sewage into a renewable energy liquid transportation fuel with a carbon footprint 90–95 percent better than gasoline, according to Argonne National Laboratories’ life cycle analysis.

Look at Your Current Process

The second rule to green design improvements is examining every current process step and asking the question, “Why is it done this way, and is there a better way to do it?”

David worked with a manufacturer of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Due to regulations, the company had to eliminate a fluorochlorinated solvent it used to clean metal parts after they were stamped out from cold rolled steel. The parts were cleaned so that they could be electroplated first with copper, then with nickel, and finally with chrome for corrosion protection. Try as it might, every new cleaning solvent the company used failed to remove all the rust from the edges of the metal stamped parts. With rusty edges the electroplating could not produce a corrosion-proof seal. Ultimately the company had to give up and use expensive stainless steel instead of cold rolled steel, which was eight times cheaper. But because the parts did not have to be cleaned after stamping and then have three successive electroplating coatings, the whole product ended up being 30 percent cheaper.

When the foreman in charge of that section of the manufacturing line was asked why the parts were ever made with cold rolled steel that needed to be cleaned and have multiple coats of electroplating, he said, “That’s the way the previous foreman showed me how to do it when I first got here.” The initial design decision was never reexamined.

Challenge any and all preexisting paradigms and beliefs. Ask, “Why is this product made from this material and made in this way?” At the product’s genesis, there might have been a sale or promotion on a component or ingredient. The component may be part of the design just because the original purchasing agent’s sister-in-law’s company was selling the material or component. A better material may have been recently developed. Look at the function of the component or material and ask, “What is the best, greenest, most cost-effective way to fulfill this function?”

This type of self-analysis can yield some very unexpected results. Jeffrey Hollender, cofounder of Seventh Generation, which manufactures a full line of household cleaning products, said, “We assumed our biggest impact was related to the manufacture of our products—the waste created by making the products. However, our biggest impact was finding that our products were designed to work in hot water, and we found that the impact of heating the water was greater than any impact from manufacturing. So we reformulated our products to work as well in cold water as in warm water.”²

Don’t Choose the Lesser of Two Evils

It’s really easy to design green products. It becomes difficult when you try to design green products that people can actually afford. While there is a market for the true-blue greens, who always buy products that are better for the environment, most people will buy a green product only if it is comparable in price and quality with other products. The challenge, therefore, is not to design green products but to design green products that are cost-effective.

As you move through the green design process, you often will be faced with choosing the lesser of two evils. Green design rule number three is, when you get to that juncture of choosing between the lesser of two evils, the correct answer is “None of the above.” The challenge is to rethink the design until you come to a solution that is truly green and cost-effective. We have never had the experience where the green, cost-effective answer was perpetually elusive. It just may take longer to come up with it.

Find a Better Way to Meet the Purpose

Rule number four is to ask, “What is the purpose of the product, and can the purpose be met using a greener and more cost-effective way?” If, for example, you are in the business of making drill bits, it is important to realize that nobody really wants a ¼-inch drill bit. What the customer really wants is a ¼-inch hole. Think of the best, greenest, and cheapest way you can deliver the result that the customer wants.

Many companies have reinvented themselves by asking this question “What is the purpose of the product or service we have been providing, and can we do it better, greener, cheaper?” For example, Interface Inc. sells modular carpeting, mostly for industrial applications. If a section of carpeting wears out, instead of getting new carpeting, the customer can replace just the worn-out piece, saving money and resources. This creates customer loyalty. The people at Interface Inc. see themselves not in the business of selling carpeting but in the business of providing a floor covering service.

How would you make your product and packaging different if you and not your customer retained ownership of the product? For example, customers don’t need lubricating oil; they need lubrication. What if you provided lubrication services to your customers instead of just selling them oil? That is essentially what Safety-Kleen does.

Consider renting your product instead of selling it. One publisher, Cengage Learning, rents textbooks to students for 40 percent to 70 percent of the retail price. In a close-to-perfect example of creating the quintessential sustainable enterprise, Better World Books designed a greener way of providing books to its customers. Better World Books is a for-profit social enterprise that collects used books from colleges and libraries and sells them online at costs significantly less than the cost of new books. It’s saving trees and landfill space and, now highly profitable, also raising money for literacy initiatives worldwide.

Many manufacturing companies design in “planned obsolescence.” They intentionally design an inferior product so that the product will break just after the warranty runs out. Other companies do the opposite. Tilley Hat, Pelican Case, and Coach Leather provide their customers with lifetime guarantees. Tilley boasts that an elephant ate one of its hats three times. Each time it was recovered from the elephant’s dung, washed, and worn again. Designing a product to be durable is key to successful green design.

One other very important point in green design is efficacy. In addition to the product having a minimal environmental footprint, it also has to do its job. One manufacturer of “green” cleaning products claimed that its products had the lowest environmental footprint of all competing products. That was true on a pound-per-pound basis. What was also true was that in efficacy tests conducted by Green Seal, water outperformed the products as a cleaning agent. When designing a sustainable product, make sure that it does the job it is supposed to do and is the best product in its category.

Design to Sustainability Product Standards

While Green Seal produced the first set of sustainability product standards in this country, a large number of standards now exist. When designing a product, ensure that your product handily meets all the appropriate sustainability and efficacy criteria. When a standard has a quantified limit—for example, for mercury in a CFL, VOCs in water-based paint, or lead and hexavalent chromium in ink—be aware that the next version of the standard is likely to have even lower limits than the current published thresholds, and design accordingly.

Those who adopt voluntary standards that surpass existing regulations will be much farther ahead of the competition and have a distinct competitive advantage. The sustainability standard from another country may shed light on the product category’s sustainability or regulatory future. For example, while no laws address the specific issue in the United States, all nail polish sold in Europe must be phthalate free. Sweden had rigorous standards for electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emanating from a computer monitor that have since been adopted as voluntary global manufacturing standards. During your green design phase, consult existing sustainability standards from this country and other countries. Most of them are in English. The “Notes and Resources” section in the back of the book provides a list of several sustainability standard-setting organizations.³

Some standards show trends—for example, for CFLs, no more than 25 milligrams (mg) of mercury is allowed until 2010, then 5 mg of mercury after that. Follow the trend in your design work. In this specific case, the writing on the wall is clear: try to use zero mercury in your product.

If no green product standard exists for your product category, make one up. You can read about ABC Home’s experience in developing its own standards in chapter 9.

Some places have also enacted extended product responsibility (EPR) laws or protocols based on the concept that a manufacturer’s responsibility for a product extends beyond the time of sale. This view incorporates a cradle-to-the-grave conception of products and relieves consumers and local governments from the costs of cleanup and dangerous materials.⁴ For example, the German Green Dot program⁵ lets manufacturers voluntarily provide a recycling infrastructure for their product packaging. If the Green Dot appears on a product package, the consumer knows that the manufacturer has effectively prepaid for the item to be recycled.

Consider implementing EPR criteria into your next product design. Some companies have even started designing their products so that the product can be disassembled with the components refurbished and sold as reconditioned used parts.

When All Else Fails, Cheat

Copy other brilliant green designers. We happen to know the best one, and fortunately, none of her designs have intellectual property protections—Mother Nature. In the multibillion years of life on this planet, every design permutation and combination has been tried. In the millions of different animals, plants, and fungal and microbial species, every imaginable and unimaginable trick and trait has been tried and either perfected or discarded. Flight, light without heat, waterproof superglues, armor, air conditioning, poisons—all have been done sustainably. For example, the configurations of every type of aircraft— jet fighters, bombers, cargo planes, reconnaissance vehicles, gliders—are virtually identical in design and function to those of different types of birds. Biomimicry is the science of how one organism mimics another and is the science of mimicking biology to design better products.

Our favorite pioneer of biomimicry is Sara Little Turnbull, director of the Process of Change, Innovation, and Design Laboratory at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She was editor of House Beautiful in the 1940s and 1950s. She also invented Pyrex cookware for Corning and the suits worn by the astronauts on the lunar landings. (By the way, the suits were made of textured soy protein and were edible.) She designed pot handles inspired by watching cheetahs catch and hold onto prey at 70 miles per hour during her trips to Africa. She invented 3M’s antipollution masks made from nonwoven fiber. Her green design process is simple: she observes and copies nature.

Author, architect, and visionary William McDonough led the greening of the White House under President Bill Clinton. He was also the innovator of the EcoMart—Walmart’s first attempt at sustainable building design for its Livermore, Kansas, facility. In the course of the green design phase, Bill essentially invented a new type of superinsulated window that transmits light but not heat. One of the candidate manufacturers multiplied the number of windows needed by the number of Walmart stores and responded, “We’ll make this window if we can sell it to all the Walmart stores.” Bill replied that the manufacturer could have the order only if it provided the window not just to Walmart but to all its customers.

Bill prepared comprehensive sustainable design principles when creating the 2000 Hannover World’s Fair in Germany.⁶ These principles are a powerful green design tool, and we recommend you review them before embarking on your green design efforts.

Summary

This chapter takes what we learned in chapter 4 on life cycle analysis and integrates those considerations into designing new products and redesigning products already in use. Your goal is to challenge any and all preexisting manufacturing techniques and raw materials usage with an eye toward sustainability. Countless examples demonstrate that you will find a better solution and business opportunities with totally unexpected conclusions. Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation realized that the greatest impact of his household cleaning products came from heating the water to use the products, not the product themselves. Nature is the finest example of sustainability, and many standards and design tools copy nature. You can too.

The easiest and most cost-effective way to be green is to design green. When designing,

• Use a life cycle approach to green design.

• Always ask, “Why is it done this way, and is there a better way to do it?”

• Never choose between the lesser of two evils.

• Ask, “What is the purpose of the product, and can the purpose be met using a greener and more cost-effective way?”

• Design to existing and anticipated environmental standards.

• Employ biomimicry—copy nature.

• Use existing sustainable design tools.

One aspect of green design is green facility design. The next chapter discusses a key component of every enterprise’s sustainability profile—its workplace.