Design for Environment: Fundamental Concepts and Engineering Design
Tools
David Allen
Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Designing products and processes that minimize environmental impacts is a challenging
process that requires the use of a wide spectrum of engineering tools. These tools can
vary depending on whether the goal is to design a commodity chemical manufacturing
process, or to optimize the disassembly of an electronic product. Regardless of the
application, however, all Design for Environment tools sets must address the problem of
assessing environmental performance. This tutorial will describe some of the methodologies
that are available for assessing environmental performance. These assessment methodologies
can be applied a variety of scales. At the most macroscopic scale, the tools of life cycle
assessment and Industrial Ecology can be used to assess the environmental performance of
products and materials as they flow through modern economies. At the meso-scale,
methodologies have been developed for assessing the environmental performance of companies
and individual processes. Finally, at the microscale, all of these assessments rely on a
scientifically sound methods for estimating the environmental risks of individual
chemicals.
The tools used in environmental performance assessments at the macro-, meso-, and
micro- scales will be presented in this tutorial. At the macro-scale, the basic principles
of life cycle assessment and material flow analyses will be described. At the meso-scale,
a variety of corporate environmental reporting metrics will be reviewed and compared, and
tools for evaluating the environmental performance of semiconductor and chemical
manufacturing processes will be discussed. Finally, at the micro-scale, a set of tools
that allow quick screening of the environmental risks of chemicals, based only on their
structure, will be reviewed.
