Sustainable Minds Enables Greener Product Design

By DE Editors

Sustainable Minds 1.0, a lifecycle assessment (LCA) program designed to help engineers improve the sustainability and lessen environmental impacts of new products, was introduced today by Sustainable Minds. The new SaaS software and information service takes a designer's BOM and offers up comparative analyses of its materials with other similar materials, assigning a sustainability score.

According to a prepared release, Sustainable Minds 1.0 "integrates on-demand, Web-based software with educational content enabling users to apply ecodesign strategies to generate innovative and greener product concepts." It enables designers to measure the potential environmental impacts of their designs and provides metrics to enable design decisions to create greener products.

According to Terry Swack, Co-founder and CEO of Sustainable Minds, the on-demand software and its accompanying website integrates three components: The LCA, a learning center so designers can get information on sustainable design practices while they work on their projects, and a community of other designers and researchers to encourage the exchange of ideas.

The core LCA around which Sustainable Minds is designed is, says Swack, is fast and easy to use and provides evaluations in a standardized and repeatable way. She says the hope is designers will use Sustainable Minds 1.0 at the earliest stages of design.

Currently there are only about 200 entities world-wide that offer full LCA because it is a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. But at $700 for a single annual subscription, Sustainable Minds LCA seems poised to change that. It requires no LCA training or expertiseand is based on the ISO 14040 framework for life cycle assessment.

Swack said the software service was aimed at product designers, mechanical engineers, and product managers as well as educational institutions teaching product design, engineering, and sustainability courses.

Sustainable Minds uses the Okala Impact Assessment Methodology that was first published in 2003 and updated in 2007. The current Okala (Okala is Hopi for "life sustaining energy") standard evaluates 10 environmental impact categories: global warming/carbon footprint, acid rain, ecotoxicity, ozone depletion, water eutrophication, photochemical smog, human respiratory, human toxicity, human carcinogens, and fossil fuel depletion.

It includes more than 450 impact factors plus their CO2 equivalent values derived from data collected from the U.S. EPA and NIST.

According to the company, the Okala Impact Assessment Methodology is the first of its kind for evaluating ecological and human health impacts from products used in North America. Okala can also be used to assess products used in regions outside of Europe.

Sustainable Minds 1.0 is used to benchmark existing products and then assist in all stages of a company's new product development process, assessing impacts before and while using CAD tools. It interoperates with any CAD or PLM system for easy import of bill of material (BOM) data and is streamlined for BOM data import from Autodesk Inventor.

The stand-alone software can also assess an entire product system, assemblies, sub-assemblies, and parts. It models impacts in all life cycle stages from manufacturing (materials/processes) through end of life. The standardized LCA process ensures ease of comparability of competing concepts, as well as different products.

Sustainable Minds runs in Firefox 2 or higher and uses Flash 8 or higher. Also supported are Explorer 7 and Safari 2, Opera 9, Chrome 1 and higher, The BOM import template can interface with any CAD system from which data can be exported. All communication between Sustainable Minds application servers and the user environment are fully encrypted using 128 bit SSL.

For more information and to try the program for 30 days, visit sustainableminds.com/product.