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NETWRK
for Electronic Product Design
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NEPD1: The REDI Benchmarking Tool

Jonathan Williams, GEM: 24th January 1996


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The Regional Eco-Efficiency Demonstrator Initiative (REDI) is a project run in the UK to help firms become more eco-efficient. The principal objective for firms is to achieve higher added-value with lower environmental costs of compliance, wastage and end-of-life liability. The project is managed as a partnership between the Group for Environmental Management (GEM), The Planning Exchange, and the Centre For Sustainable Design. The first sector to be addressed is the electronic equipment sector. Executive members of the Environmental Network for Electronic Product Designers are all participating in the project.

The REDI Benchmarking tool is being developed as an aid to eco-efficient product engineering. It looks at the complete life-cycle of any product, and a brief summary of its operating method is shown below.

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This benchmarking tool is different from a simple LIfe Cycle Analysis in that it looks at costs, values and liabilities rather than at particular emissions, which are often difficult to work with in a design context. Many of the costs associated with a specific design are 'hidden' (eg, costs of regulatory compliance, costs of waste handling, etc); so the tool attempts to quantify these costs and compare them with the value added to the product at each stage of its life cycle. Product engineers, working with the matrix of values illustrated above, can then attempt to reduce each cost in turn and, in particular, can gauge what alterations to a given production method are likely to yield significant gains in added-value versus cost.

The model is capable of considerable refinement since, where a product includes several components or modules, a separate matrix can be constructed for each such component and the results summed using calculations which are easily handled by computer methods. A few of the questions which it can answer are, for instance:

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Further events are planned to engage the industry in the process of developing this benchmarking tool, and in other aspects of REDI.


Information presented by Jonathan Williams:

jjew@mail.soc.soton.ac.uk

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