July 2023 The Shift e-newsletter
Sustainable by Design Webinar | Anticipatory LCA and Applications | Upcoming Training
Free Webinar:
Sustainable by Design
DATE: July 20, 2023
TIME: 1:00pm - 2:00pm ET
PRESENTERS: Tina Cowen, Teja Chatty
DESCRIPTION:
Sustainable Design seeks to maximize environmental, social, and economic benefits across a product’s entire life cycle while minimizing associated costs. This is often supported by life cycle assessment (LCA), a technique to quantify the environmental impacts across a product’s life.
In this webinar we will discuss strategies and approaches to adopt sustainable design principles in industry product development practice.
PRESENTER BIOS:
Lina Cowen is a Mechanical Engineering and Sustainable Design Tech Lead at Synapse Product development, where she helps bring innovative ideas to life. While at Synapse, she's been part of the team crafting Synapse's sustainable product design practice, specializing in Life Cycle Assessment, sustainable design and implementation, supply chain management, circular design and Whole System Mapping. During her tenure she has had the pleasure of working on a wide range of projects - from small consumer electronics and agricultural technologies to at-home composting solutions and ecosystems for last-mile delivery. Lina is originally from Boston with her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.
Teja Chatty just graduated from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth with a PhD in sustainable product design and manufacturing. Her research focuses on developing tools to support industry practitioners in applying sustainable design strategies and life cycle assessment in the early-stages of product development. Her team of students at Dartmouth collaborated with Synapse and EarthShift to design and develop a new tool focused on product design. She will soon start working at Synapse Product Development and Capgemini Invent as a Managing Consultant (Sustainability).
How Anticipatory LCA Fosters Innovation and Management Support for Sustainability and Circularity
It’s exciting to see new ideas advance through the R&D process.
And, it’s also an ideal moment for organizations to explore how circularity and sustainability can help generate better business opportunities when products or services reach market — a win-win proposition that can enable sustainability practitioners to garner attention and enthusiasm in the executive suite.
Anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment (A-LCA) is a powerful tool in this scenario, because in addition to revealing foreseeable negative consequences and identifying ways to improve a product’s environmental profile, it’s also capable of informing the thought process that goes into development of innovative business models.
Several examples of this can be found in a 2020 white paper published by the leading tech company HP. Broadly focused on a circularity-oriented strategy of transitioning from traditional product sales to selling services, the case studies (which draw on A-LCAs conducted by EarthShift Global and other providers) also offer insights into synergies between sustainability considerations and business goals.
Upcoming Online Training
Introduction to Sustainability Assessment
July 18, 2023
Advanced Life Cycle Assessment - Anticipatory LCA
August 23-24, 202
Custom LCA Training
By arrangement