Calculate carbon footprint - How you reduce the carbon footprint of your designs is becoming more important as new products and processes are designed. Tackling major environmental issues as well as legal implications force companies to do calculate carbon footprint exercises as part of their due dilligence.

Why is sustainability important ?

Sustainability in environmental science and technology has become an integral part of the design process. In the USA even the defense department has military environmental design specifications that add an ecological dimension to the conceptual design process for military hardware.

Our resources our limited and we want to make best use of them and ensure those resources are available in the future. The green design of products is an attempt to preserve our environment.

Carbon footprint calculations

A carbon footprint calculator is extremely useful in assessing the environmental impact of different designs. Materials can be evaluated in terms of environmental factors as well as for material and useability concerns. A report can be generated comparing the pros and cons of one desgn concept over another.

The report is more than just lists of environmental problems. It is both a cost and risk control document.

The areas checked in the report are carbon footprint, ecological indicators such as air acidification and water eutrophication as well as total energy consumed by the design. It then becomes simple to quantify these areas to determine which design is best in terms of sustainability.

Using the part in the picture above as an example, sustainability analysis is used to test the same part fabricated in two different materials, 304 stainless steel and PVC plastic. While this might not be totally right from a design perspective, it is fine to illustrate what the analysis does.

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The picture above shows the results of analyzing PVC plastic. The material is selected as well as the geographic area in which both the material and fabrication will take place.

The report also serves as evidence of due dilligence in the prevention of major environmental problems . As well, investigating environmentally sound designs often result in solutions that have the manufacturing lowest cost.

Please call AAA Drafting if you have any projects that require a carbon footprint calculation as part of the desiign process. We make use of sustainability software to produce reports that will demonstrate the environmental impact of your companies designs.

By changing from one different material to another, you can see the effect that manufacturing has on the environment as well as the effect of having parts made in various parts of the world. The objective is to find the material and location that presents the least environmetal impact.