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NETW
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for Electronic Product Design
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CfSD Conferences and Networks
page. | NEPD Homepage | Online
conference
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:
Information presented by Jonathan Williams: