Low-carbon Design
Carbon footprinting your business? Are you going to get the full story? Probably not, unless you look at low-carbon design of products. The vast majority of your carbon footprint can result from the use phase of products you make rather than the manufacturing and distribution phases. This use phase is determined by the design approaches in your product development process.
Whilst most carbon footprinting exercises deal with energy use for manufacture and distribution directly related to a company’s activities very few look in detail at other life-cycle stages to get a true picture of the full-life carbon impact.
When developing a carbon-led design strategy you need to consider all areas of the life-cycle stage from extraction to disposal, included embedded carbon in materials, carbon impacts of using resources such as electricity, water or other consumables during the products life with the customer, transit impacts, storage impacts (particularly in the retail food chill-chain), and disposal options.
eco3 has addressed this issue with the development of a Low-Carbon Design Process. Our approach allows companies to ensure that their products and services have the lowest true life-time carbon impact. We help to reduce impact at the design stage of product, packaging or service. We focus on areas that can account for up to 95% of full-life carbon impacts and that are usually omitted in traditional site-based carbon foot-print studies.
