“Sustainable design” is the mantra of the day in everything to do with product development and product life cycle—with good reason. Therefore, sustainability is the subject of intensive investments by PLM developers. In the last few years alone, they have added modules and capabilities to their offerings, including life cycle assessment (LCA), databases of environmentally friendly materials, tools to meet regulations and standards, and more.
I caught up with the big three PLM players to discuss this topic. This article focuses on a discussion with PTC's vice president of Sustainability, Dave Duncan. As for Dassault Systèmes and Siemens Digital Industries, I will return to them in coming articles.
Creating a Circular Economy Step by Step
I asked Duncan, how do you make products that are sustainable? How do you create a circular economy?
He said, “The world's engineers and product developers play incredibly important roles on the way forward. As well as the digital tools needed to support the development of innovative and minimal environmental impact solutions.”
“Remember that eighty percent of a product's footprint is determined by the design,” he stated. “With innovative technology, well-thought-out processes, informed choices of raw materials and balanced extraction of fossil substances and metals, the world's engineers can make a lot happen. Of course, they cannot reverse the trend themselves. Everyone has to help, but technological development has always been a fundamental part of human action.”
When discussing circular economies, you can take the high-level approach to overarching sustainability principles, but as Dave Duncan notes, development is just as much about the smaller steps. We have to think about innovations, manufacturing and more, step by step, and let the overall principles drill down and guide how the work is carried out.
How Can Plastic Become Sustainable?
For instance, consider the topic of sustainability as related to plastic handling. How does this fit into a circular economy?
“It is far from just that we collect oil and make plastic from it,” says Duncan. “At the other end, it's even worse. The world's oceans and also the environments on land are overflowing with plastic debris and plastic pollution has become one of our most pressing environmental challenges.”
“The environment, governments and private [sectors] have taken steps to promote recycling and reduce plastic waste with measures that have included phasing out certain single-use plastics, plus setting specific targets for plastic recycling,” he adds. “This is good and necessary. But, at the same time, we must remember that plastic is still an important material for products in everything from mobile phones to cars and washing machines.”
So, plastic is needed, which means that continued use requires the use of fossil substances such as oil in production. The question is: As we strive to move to a circular economy based on environmentally friendly production, how can we bring plastics into the equation?
“There's really a lot to think about here,” comments Duncan. It requires “a reconsideration of how we design, manufacture, use and reuse plastic. Here, a redesigned system is needed where the material is reused as much as possible.”
The general advice from Duncan and PTC is that, when using plastic, ensure that you use the least amount possible, taking into account the shape, fit and function of the product. But PTC also recommends using modular design, AI-controlled generative design technologies and CAD tools that connect material databases to the design work.
The Role of Modular Design in Sustainability
Modular design allows for mass customization, but more importantly from a sustainability standpoint it mandates the need for simple disassembly instructions.
“For manufacturers, digital tools that support modular design help significantly,” says Duncan. “Modular design allows mass customization with, for example, interchangeable modules in products. But more importantly, it provides a bill of disassembly with instructions attached. The name of the game in the circular economy is not necessarily to recycle all the material and melt it down again and make it into something new; the goal is to use something as long as you can and then, when you can't use it anymore, remove as many of the significant components as possible and reuse them as much as possible at the ‘big’ component level. If neither of this applies, well, then you return to the material level, grind it up or melt it down, to manufacture something else."
He claims that the idea is to gradually move towards zero landfill usage, and additionally, that whatever processing is needed is done without carbon dioxide emissions. He says, “It will be extremely difficult to reach zero waste or carbon dioxide, but you can advance a good distance towards this goal.”
Modular design can therefore play important roles in several places in the product development and product life processes, particularly when it comes to disassembly of a product.
“True,” replies Duncan, “but problems can pile up technically if you have a part that contains several materials. Let's say it contains molded plastic with some metal. How do you do it then? You take something apart, and this plastic is recyclable, but because it's formed with metal, it will almost certainly end up straight in a landfill.”
He points to an umbrella as the perfect example of this, “It has some aluminum as a component, and it has a recyclable handle molded in plastic. But most places are not set on recycling umbrellas; they are thrown away and scrapped even though everything is recyclable at the component level. If you don't make a disassembly list, which can practically make it easy or possible to separate these recyclables through a disassembly procedure, then you risk ending up in a mess.”
But just because a product can be easily taken apart doesn't mean that it will be—especially during disposal where the return on investment for consumers is low.
“This means maintaining a commercial arrangement with a customer who in turn encourages their customer to return or reuse the plastic. With the help of modular design and disassembly instructions, it is possible to ensure the possibilities of reusing solutions, whether it is reusing the assembly that contains the plastic in a new product or further disassembling so the plastic can be recycled and melted down or reworked into a secondary product.”
A New Way of Thinking
It goes without saying that it takes time to educate designers about new ways of thinking. But in many cases, it doesn't have to be more difficult than sowing some inspirational seeds. At present, the focus of designers is not necessarily to try to eliminate plastic, but to introduce the idea that if they use plastic, it should preferably be done in a way that it can be recycled.
“Suppose you have to use plastic after all. Then you should design your product and your commercial offers so that they are recycled in a more reliable way,” says Duncan “It can come from a regulatory authority or via requirements from a particular company. These requirements can be explicitly linked to the design and how it is used, and this will ensure that designers respect the design intent as stated in the requirements statement.”
Other material options could also be introduced using materials databases. Duncan says, “It's a well-invested and growing area, where companies that provide material service catalogs with curated data that enable designers to understand its recyclability, REACH and RoHS compliance, and the embodied carbon in its extraction, transportation and processing. Once the material is selected, these attributes can be pulled into the PLM systems directly or through CAD during the design stage. It can then be rolled up into the assemblies and BOMs in Windchill so that one can understand the total footprint of the selected materials.”
Duncan adds, “There are similar catalogs … where you can choose capacitors, bolts, screws or other components with similarly selected information about how recyclable the material is: What is it made of? What are the dangers of the material? Are there component-level risks to carbon and supply chains? And etc.”
All material and component information covered by these databases can be associative and pluggable. By adding this all with PLM technology, engineers can perform relative LCA and carbon footprint comparisons among design options.
Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions
How can we encourage taking the sustainability path forward in design work?
“Generative design is a major help in most situations, but it is currently limited to one or only a few materials at a time in a part analysis,” says Duncan. “The technology is not yet enhanced to deal with mixtures of metal and plastic, but it has reasonable potential to get there.”
He adds, “With this type of optimization, simulations within PLM workflows … can also have so-called ‘promotion validators.’ With such a validator, before an engineer can release the design or set it up for review, it can enforce that specific simulations or optimizations are run against the design and then integrate the results in such a way that other engineers can't skip a step where it can remove excess material or suggest better means of separation. This is absolutely one of the faster paths to a more sustainability-optimizing culture.”
Duncan adds that some companies are even starting to “gamify” the carbon footprint of their design.
“Exactly, and this can be made interactive and translated into something meaningful. For example, an engine designer may be encouraged to reduce weight from the engine, where it is predicted that the engine will be used in one million trucks. When the engineer goes through their business and reduces the carbon footprint, they can get a summary that says: 'your work today took 1,000 pickup trucks off the road.' We have seen in analyses that this type of feedback is very motivating for engineers.”
Duncan concludes that, “Although the journey towards a circular economy for plastics will be slow, steps are already being taken. The pace will increase as more companies use modular and generative design with informed supplier decisions. But for now, every opportunity to reduce the damage from plastic should be taken because every incremental improvement, no matter how small, moves us closer to where we ultimately need to be.”