Consortium helps members cut environmental impact

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 3, 2008

The EMIT Consortium will help members design for minimum environmental impact, including low carbon footprint, energy efficiency, reduced wastes and emissions and avoidance of restricted substances.

The Environmental Materials Information Technology (EMIT) Consortium, co-ordinated by the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), will target materials and process decisions that control the environmental impact of engineered products.

It will develop information resources and software to aid members' responses to environmental regulations and help them design for minimum environmental impact, including low carbon footprint, energy efficiency, reduced wastes and emissions and avoidance of restricted substances.

The three-year project begins on 1st July with founder members Emerson Electric, Eurocopter, NASA and Rolls-Royce.

It is expected to grow to between ten and fifteen member organisations.

Granta is the primary software developer for the Consortium.

Regulations such as the European Union's Reach will have a profound effect on manufacturing organisations.

Materials or processes may become obsolete or prohibitively expensive.

Problems with compliance will introduce delays and cost.

Other environmental objectives, such as a low carbon footprint or design for end-of-life, are becoming more important due to consumer demand and government action, such as carbon trading schemes.

By far the best response is to build consideration of these factors into the design process, where modifications to products cost the least and have the greatest impact.

Material and of manufacturing process choices are of central importance, since these determine the use of restricted substances and can have a major influence on energy usage and emissions over a product's lifetime.

Requirements for such choices include: accurate information on restricted substances and on "eco properties" such as the carbon dioxide generated in producing a raw material.

Specialist analysis capabilities also required, for example, to estimate the carbon dioxide that a potential product will generate at each stage in its lifecycle, based on the materials and processes it uses.

Companies need well-managed corporate materials information integrated with their wider business and engineering systems to enable all materials in a company's products to be identified and the impact of materials substitutions to be assessed.

Today, most manufacturing enterprises have none of these elements in place.

Excellence in eco design demands integrated and easy access to all of them.

This is the focus of the EMIT Consortium.

The starting point will be proven technology developed at Granta and the University of Cambridge in each of these key areas: eco property data, eco analysis software and materials information management.

Consortium members will implement and apply this technology in their design processes and guide its further development and integration.

The model for the project is the Material Data Management Consortium, which has brought together leaders in aerospace, defence and energy to develop best practice approaches and software to manage mission-critical materials data.

The MDMC is now in its sixth year, with seventeen active member organisations.