08 Sep Designing for a Lower Carbon Footprint
Mechanical Engineering Magazine has a good article for designers about significantly lowering the overall energy impact of our products, based on the vision of Saul Griffith, a mechanical engineer and serial inventor. The good news is that we don’t have to start creating medical devices from bamboo.
Griffith sees three routes to cut the amount of energy embedded in personal possessions. One is to simply have less stuff, though that seems more like poverty than efficiency. Another is to make goods more efficiently. That has a role, Griffith said, but a limited one.
“Through material and design changes, say you can cut in half the energy used to make the object,” Griffith said. “For an object that should have a lifetime of one year, if you just do those material changes and design changes, you can halve the amount of energy over that year.
“But because time is in the denominator of the embodied energy equation for an object, it dominates the equation,” Griffith continued. “The easiest way to get the most out of your objects is to make them last a lot longer.”
I agree with the sentiment, and, “they just don’t make it like they used to” is true far more than it isn’t. But, can this philosophy of making long-lasting products translate into my work as a medical device designer?
My first hurdle, and probably the toughest to overcome, is the efficiency of disposables. Because of sterility requirements that prevent the spread of disease and because disposables provide an attractive long term revenue stream, the medical industry has grown quite fond of the disposable model. Quite often, a device has both a durable portion and a disposable one to reduce overall waste. Perhaps we could design parts for chemical or thermal sterilization instead, but there is considerable inertia in the marketplace that will resist such change.
- Any new products would have to overcome the perception that it’s not clean unless it came from the factory in a sealed bag
- The marketplace would have to show that disposables are not an attractive business model
The second hurdle is the pace of innovation. Products and technologies change so quickly that it’s easy to imagine that something will surely supplant my latest product. However, hospitals and insurance companies are generally not considered “early adopters” and can be especially fickle about buying the latest “thing”, probably because of the accountants that are driven by the bottom line. If a product is guaranteed to last for 10 years instead of 3 years, a 3X higher cost can be easily justified.
I’m sure there are other considerations that keep designers from developing longer-lasting products, but are they reasonable? Can we work around them by thinking differently? Can we improve the bottom line for the medical device consumers while maintaining the standard of care and reducing our impact on the environment?
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