eco3 services

Global climate change is happening. Regardless of the debates concerning its cause, its impacts are real and significant. These impacts: extreme weather events, sea-level rise, temperature increases for some and reductions for others, mass migration, changing productivity of agricultural systems, and variable availability of natural raw materials (amongst others) will have significant effects on business and society. Furthermore, we are entering a period of resource scarcity and resource price rises. Peak-oil is approaching and there are significant transition movements emerging from the consumer. Add that to increasing demand for oil and other natural resources price stability will be a thing of the past.

Carbon is the new currency. Manufacturers and suppliers are being asked to undertake carbon footprint assessments of their operations. This can be due to retailers requiring suppliers to provide a footprint of their products, targets within the company’s environmental management systems, or commitments made under the Business in the Community’s May Day agreements. With businesses rushing to carbon footprint their operations it is easy to forget that the vast majority of a company’s carbon footprint is down to embedded impact or the use phase of the products and packaging that they produce. This impact is determined by the design of the product and packaging. It can account for over 95% of a company’s impact yet traditional carbon footprinting tends to focus on site-based impacts.

Still referred to by the misguided as the silent salesman. Packaging can drive sales but in a much more subtle way than it has previously done. Less is more. Customers have become more sophisticated and are more demanding with regards to environmental credentials of the brands they buy. The totem for this is your packaging. Get it wrong and you`ve missed an opportunity. We deliver improved packaging that also lowers environmental impact. Reducing packaging reduces both costs and carbon footprint. It can also reduce volumetric size and therefore transport and logistics impacts. Oh, and don`t forget, eco-design of packaging helps you meet legal requirements in relation to two pieces of packaging regulation. Tends to focus the mind. We have developed a simple to use design and environmental assessment tool that compares the environmental impact of different packaging options taking into account carbon footprint, weight, recyclability, recycled content, volumetric efficiency, transit impacts and product/packaging ratio.

Ecodesign and sustainable design run through innovation like Blackpool through a stick of rock. To innovate and not consider environmental and sustainability drivers is folly. All products are subject to a raft of drivers for improved ecodesign including legislation, resource efficiency, peak-oil, adaptation requirements, customer requirements and lean manufacturing. Environmental issues are only one design constraint/opportunity and we approach this subject by placing all design drivers in context and understanding the needs of the client and the customer group. Its not just about designing an eco-product, it’s about designing a great product that has environment embedded in it. Your products are your interface with your customer. They trust you, they want you to be doing the right thing by the environment.

Carbon footprinting your business? Are you going to get the full story? Probably not, unless you look at low-carbon design of products. The vast majority of your carbon footprint can result from the use phase of products you make rather than the manufacturing and distribution phases. This use phase is determined by the design approaches in your product development process. Whilst most carbon footprinting exercises deal with energy use for manufacture and distribution directly related to a company’s activities very few look in detail at other life-cycle stages to get a true picture of the full-life carbon impact. When developing a carbon-led design strategy you need to consider all areas of the life-cycle stage from extraction to disposal, included embedded carbon in materials, carbon impacts of using resources such as electricity, water or other consumables during the products life with the customer, transit impacts, storage impacts (particularly in the retail food chill-chain), and disposal options.

Our philosophy is that waste is best removed at source. 80% of the costs and environmental impact of a product are determined at the design phase. Once a product has been designed you know its whole life costs. You know when it will fail, what the warranty claims are likely to be, user costs per unit of utility and what disposal costs are likely to be. The design phase is crucial. We recently worked with a group of 10 companies in the food and drink sector to minimise and redesign their packaging. This project reduced costs by £1.5 million and reduced carbon impact by 18,000 tonnes CO2. We were the sole technical consultancy on a second project, entitled Designing-out Waste. Working with 100 businesses overall savings were £2.4 million. These were achieved by implementing waste reduction, waste exchange, energy efficiency and eco-design opportunities. Although eco-design services were delivered to 12% of companies they made up 48% of all savings identified.

Your environmental responsibility now extends beyond your factory gates. You are also have a legal and financial responsibility for your products and packaging. Do you know what happens to them at the end of their lives? If you don’t then you should!. Producer responsibility is a concept that can impose accountability over the entire life cycle of products and packaging placed on the market and over the past few years an ever growing amount of legislation has brought producer responsibility to an increasing number of companies.