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Recent Advances in Design for Environment at Motorola
Author(s) -
Hoffman William F.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of industrial ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.377
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1530-9290
pISSN - 1088-1980
DOI - 10.1162/jiec.1997.1.1.131
Subject(s) - design for the environment , flexibility (engineering) , control reconfiguration , systems engineering , new product development , life cycle assessment , product (mathematics) , product design , manufacturing engineering , industrial ecology , product lifecycle , computer science , environmental impact assessment , engineering , sustainability , embedded system , production (economics) , ecology , statistics , geometry , mathematics , marketing , biology , economics , business , macroeconomics
Summary Motorola is a large electronics company that uses design for environment (DfE) t o address our customers' environmental needs. In working to integrate environmental considerations into product design, Motorola has encountered new challenges in product design, and as a result has had to develop new frameworks and employ new analytical tools. This article describes those challenges and Motorola's efforts to date. The examination of how products are designed in Motorola led to the realization that there are distinct phases in design: concept development, detail design, and prototype manufacture. In the earlier phases where the greatest flexibility for product reconfiguration exists, there is the least amount of detailed information available for use in making environmental assessments. In an effort to match the data availability to the environmental assessment needs, Motorola developed a tiered approach to DE using a matrix‐based abridged life‐cycle assessment (LCA) in the concept development stage, a scoring system based in part on multiattribute value theory in the detail design stage, and potentially full‐scale life‐cycle assessment in the prototype manufacturing stage.