Green buildings, hybrid cars, solar panels, organic food, fair trade goods and more - living an eco-friendly lifestyle is now easier than ever! Environmental awareness and social responsibility associated with product purchases is now becoming an important part of the decision-making process for many of us.
In choosing a sustainable lifestyle, remember that the cost of goods is primarily driven by the cost of energy. Most goods are primarily based upon the cost of materials, other than software, books, etc wherein labor is a significant factor. Increasingly consumers, employees, shareholders, government, non-government organizations and
service groups, like insurance companies and banks, are considering social and environmental responsibility as an important part of their operating practices.
However, many purchases made to "benefit the environment" are misguided in that they involve paying for an item with a long payback period compared to the operational life of the product. Therefore, products with a long payback are fundamentally not "sustainable" and do not represent a good use of resources to make. When you look at a purchase, consider the energy savings and potential pollution reduction or avoidance, and consider the payback and the projected useful life of a product.
Products with the MOST environment benefits will have a pay back period of less than 4 years, and ideally they should pay back in 1-2 years and the useful life of the item should be at least 3-10x greater than the payback period. The shorter the payback period and the longer the useful life, the greater the benefit of the item.
This means that when we use energy to make a product, we can have the greatest impact on climate change, pollution and the associated ill health, by choosing products with a quick payback and a long useful life so that the energy and pollution savings become ever greater.
Also, if you have an environmentally good product you no longer want, give it away to someone who will use it to ensure that the full environmental benefits of an energy saving product are realized. If a product is discarded before its useful life is finished, a portion of the benefits of making the energy efficient and/or environmentally friendly item are lost.
Once a product has reached its useful end of life, reuse the parts or recycle it to ensure that we have a truly sustainable future.
A recent example of such a product development is a new vacuum cleaner for one of our clients. We were asked to develop a range of new vacuum cleaners that use less power yet provide equal or better performance.
We looked at the subsystems which were required to produce the product:
1. a floor engaging nozzle;
2. a separation system for removing particles entrained in the air stream;
3. a motor and fan blade to create air flow through the system
We started out by looking at how to reduce the power consumption of the separation system for removing particles entrained in the air stream. We developed a high performance cyclonic separation system which removes 99.9% of particles at 1 micron with 25% less back pressure than convention cyclone separators and which were 25% smaller and lighter as they had a higher filling capacity (many patents including US 6,874,197).
We then developed a fan blade with a higher fluid mechanical efficiency to compliment our reduced power requirements due to the reduced back pressure from our high performance cyclonic separation system (US Patent #6,280,143) and other patents. The enhanced fan blade reduced our power requirements by a further 18%. This allowed us to develop a smaller, lighter, lower cost more efficient electric motor. In looking at the smaller motor design we were able to use more efficient magnetic materials and bearings because of the reduced power requirements.
These improvements reduced our power requirements from 1500W to only 922W. The smaller cyclonic separation chamber, smaller motor and smaller fan blade allowed us to reduce the weight of the product to 14 pounds versus competitive products with lesser features at 19 pounds.
Thus, our final product cost less to manufacture as it had fewer parts, used less plastic, incorporated a lighter more efficient motor, better separation performance, and the product will save 289 kWh of electricity over its useful operating life of 500 hours. This 289 kWh savings is equivalent to 635 pounds of carbon dioxide not being released into the environment.
This is one of many design projects wherein careful planning, engineering, and leading edge science can create products that are more energy efficient and cost less.
Regards, Wayne