Prelude to COFES 2010: Terry Swack on Sustainability

Terry Swack, cofounder and CEO of Sustainable Minds, likes to point out, "There's no such thing as a green product -- only greener products." All products, she explains, uses energy, requires raw materials, and produces impacts on the environment, so they cannot be wholly green, but some products are greener than others by comparison.

Swack also distinguishes between designing something for compliance and designing something to be environment-friendly. To borrow a phrase from the building and construction industry, to design something for compliance, or to design it to meet the requirements and standards of the industry and region, is to be "barely legal." But to design or redesign a product to be truly sustainable is to innovate.

Traditionally, a product's bill of materials (BOM) encompasses raw materials, part numbers, supplier information, and other items needed to manufacture the part -- "cradle to gate," as Swack puts it. But to design sustainable products, Swack encourages engineers to consider system BOM, encompassing a product's entire lifecycle -- "cradle to grave or cradle to cradle."

That means taking into account not only raw materials and part numbers but also the energy required to acquire and transport the materials, the pollution that might come from the manufacturing process, and end-of-life treatment (Can the product be recycled? If not, what's its impact when it's disposed in a landfill?).

Sustainable Minds is a founding partner of the Design and Sustainability Symposium, a regular feature of the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES). Swack and COFES organizers will be at the symposium to continue the discussion on lifecycle assessment (LCA) and its implications. They invite you to share your ideas.

For more, listen to the podcast with Swack below (roughly 10 mins).