Analyzing Materials for Sustainability Is Tricky

In an ideal world, making sustainable products at a competitive pace would be light work for product designers. Why aren’t we there yet? One theory is that it’s too hard to juggle – and rely on – the data used to calculate sustainability. A Forrester survey found that enhanced data quality was the factor that product designers and sourcing decision-makers most desired in order to achieve more efficient design cycles.

Makersite is a platform product designers use to compile data and instantly evaluate carbon emission, cost, and compliance metrics across a product’s lifecycle. To help support design engineers, Makersite is integrated into Ansys’ Granta software and Autodesk’s Fusion 360. 

Here’s a breakdown of how Makersite is deployed as an add-on to Autodesk Fusion 360:

This summer, Makersite integrated Carbon Minds’ product carbon footprint and life cycle assessment database into the Makersite data foundation. The goal was to provide designers with a greater depth of materials data.

We caught up with Neil D’Souza, founder and CEO of Makersite, to get his view of the use of chemical evaluation in designing sustainable products.

How important is sustainability to chemicals and plastics manufacturers?

Neil D’Souza: Very important, but it’s not so much because of regulations. The chemical industry is one of the most regulated. The sustainability aspect is to attract customers, gain competitor advantage, and to create better products. We help our customers achieve their goals in sustainability. That has the most impact in the downstream market, helping designers make the best products. That impacts their customers.

Related:Best Practices for Medical Device Material Selection

Sustainability is one aspect of materials, but measurability is also important. Downstream the products are regulated. People want to know if you’re putting harmful chemicals in a product. With better chemicals, do I get better performance? What are the use cases? Transparency in environmental impact is crucial. Transparency leads to a more sustainable product. Most customers just want to know how sustainable the product is. Once you have the evidence of the good or bad materials in a product, you can use increased reporting to help to improve the product.

In the chemical business, the company has lots and lots of products. They want to be able to leverage a single chemical across as many customers as possible. This is where innovation comes in to improve the product. They’re taking a portfolio approach to sustainability. It improves profitability. It’s driven by opportunity rather than risk.

Related:10 Sustainability Questions You Need to Ask

Here’s a breakdown of Makersite’s AI-based product lifecycle intelligence:

Explain the value of the Carbon Minds integration.

D’Souza: It gives us ease of use. We have a saying: We all cook with cold water. Whatever product you make you will have chemicals, plastics, metals, and back and forth. At the end of the day, you have chemicals in the products. Having an understanding of the materials makes sense. There are 200 million chemicals in the world. Only a few hundred have environmental data behind them. There just isn’t enough data that is specific enough. Carbon Minds is the largest database for chemicals. If the customer is trying to make a mobile phone, they get data from Carbon Minds that helps them understand the materials. They get the amount of recycled content. Carbon Minds has done this hard work and we provide that to our customers.

Why is it a struggle for chemicals and plastics manufacturers to identify and eliminate the use of harmful materials and processes?

D’Souza: One of the struggles is getting data on the materials. But it’s not just the data. You need to know about the environmental impact or footprint. What is a bad chemical? That idea evolves over time. There were chemicals that were considered safe in the past and today we know them to be harmful. Some chemicals are bad and we don‘t even know that they’re bad. If you just follow regulations, it’s just about the past. You have to be future looking and ask if this chemical is safe. It’s not just about regulatory compliance, it’s about risk.

The mature manufacturers want to screen their products. What are the harmful chemicals in there? That’s very hard to tell. You have a regulation that this is a bad group of materials. But there are some chemicals that are similar to this group.

It’s hard to find replacements. If you know something is bad, you need to know how much you’re allowed to use, and you need to know what the alternatives are. We have alternatives for a small sample, but not across the board. We want to eliminate plastics in products around the world, but if you replace all the plastics, you will have to cut down a forest the size of Europe every year.

Explain how Makersite enables companies to manage product sustainability, cost, and compliance.

D’Souza: Companies are competing for the quality of the products. They have to supply regulatory information. How do you screen for it, and how do you find alternatives? Something with a better carbon footprint could be harmful. We create visibility in the marketplace so you can see these things. We want to empower the tools that engineers are already using. We want to show the cost, the environmental impact, and the functionality.