Sustainable Design

If products are looked at in isolation, it’s relatively easy to chip away at production efficiencies and refinements in quality and performance. Sustainable Design recognises that decisions made by chemists and chemical engineers can have much bigger impacts further down supply chains.

Questions you may ask to improve the overall impact of the end market product include:

    •    How can we influence the ease of recyclability/ reusability of the product?
    •    How can we affect the energy/ water required to use the end product?

Sustainable Design is about considering the life-cycle and longer term impacts of the product, whether it is a detergent, house, vehicle, paint, clothing, or drug. (The concept of Product Footprinting is covered in this section: Link)

To help see how Sustainable Design thinking can influence the innovations in your company, Chemistry Innovation KTN have produced a Sustainable Design Guide, which we would recommend consulting: www.chemistryinnovation.co.uk/sdg

We can also recommend referring to CIKTN’s database of case studies, which provide excellent examples of how innovations in the chemical sector have contributed to improving the sustainability of products: http://www.chemistryinnovation.co.uk/roadmap/sustainable/casestudies.asp?id=64

Linked to Sustainable Design is the concept of Green Chemistry. This is a chemical philosophy encouraging the design of products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. For more information on the principals of Green Chemistry and how it is influencing, and influenced by, industry and consumers, see the Green Chemistry Network website: www.greenchemistrynetwork.org