Designing to Minimize Environmental Impact

Ed Brown, SAE Media Group

In a 2021 article in the Financial Times , Julian Allwood, Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge, wrote: “The climate summit in Glasgow was a failure because it was predicated on the fiction that technology will solve the problem of climate change.”

This is a typical comment and it got me thinking about whether there is something more that technologists could do than such things as improving renewable power generation, electrification of vehicles, innovating recycling, and optimizing building systems.

Was there something I could have contributed when I was tasked to implement a system design back when I was a work-a-day engineer?

Thinking back on the process I would go through; I would start by carefully studying the specs. Drawing on my knowledge of existing technology, I would try to decide on the best approach for meeting those specs.

Top of the list was to decide how I could meet the specs and come in on time and for the lowest cost.

• I could minimize the time I would have to invest if I used pre-existing designs — that would mean both a lower cost and an easier path to making the due date.
• I would do a rough materials list to estimate cost and see if there were any long delivery items.
• Then I would think about whether there was new technology I could use or creative ways to improve the existing designs.
• I would consider manufacturability — how this would fit in with existing manufacturing methods and capabilities.

But I realize now that I could have also included the best approach for minimizing my design’s environmental impact as one of the basic design criteria along with performance, cost, and time. Rather than just meeting the minimum specs, suppose I added criteria such as minimizing input power, minimizing size and weight, using recyclable materials, and using locally sourced materials to minimize shipping.

A problem with this approach is that designing to minimize environmental impact could increase cost and impact delivery time — so what about that?

Adding environmental impact to the design criteria can add to the immediate costs — but I think it’s worth it. Maybe that would be a small price to pay when considering the long-term costs of climate change from events such as the recent hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Florida.

According to the NASA Earth Observatory :

• Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human activities — particularly emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — are mostly responsible for making our planet warmer.
• According to an ongoing temperature analysis led by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880. The majority of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20° C per decade.

Technology was what made the Industrial Revolution possible, so I think it’s only fitting that technology should play a role in mitigating its negative side effects.

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