Product Stewardship
Product stewardship seeks to design products which minimize or eliminate environmental impacts. Furthermore, manufacturers are responsible for the end-of-life disposition of the product.
Product stewardship considers environmental impacts at the product design and manufacture stage. This includes choosing non-toxic and recycled materials and designing products to be durable, reuseable, remanufacturable, and recyclable. It also considers what will be done with the product at end-of-life. There are a number of services NYSP2I offers to assist product manufacturers.
Product Evaluation and Design for the Environment
NYSP2I evaluates products to identify opportunities for environmental improvement. Opportunities may include replacing materials with less environmentally harmful or recycled materials, reducing material usage, and reducing packaging. NYSP2I engineers will work with you to evaluate products and assist with implementation.
Remanufacturing
The National Center for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery (NC3R) at RIT helps companies integrate remanufacturing into their global product support strategies. Remanufacturing is the process of restoring end-of-life products to “like new” or “better than new” performance levels. NC3R assists companies with analysis of their remanufacturing business case, condition assessment of components, product design enhancements, reverse logistics modeling, and remanufacturing process development. Remanufacturing keeps retired products out of landfills and prevents pollution and energy consumption from raw material extraction and manufacturing processes that would be required to make a new product from scratch.
Life Cycle Assessment
A more holistic approach may be taken to evaluate the product life-cycle by conducting a Life Cycle Assessment or LCA. An LCA considers the environmental impact of a product from raw material acquisition, to manufacturing, use, and finally end of life disposition. LCA is an excellent tool to identify the environmental impact of processes in order to drive product design decisions. LCA is commonly used to quantify the environmental impacts of products in order to draw comparisons between different products which perform the same function. NYSP2I provides LCA and independent LCA review services.
Please contact us if you would like assistance with a product stewardship project.
Examples of Product Stewardship Projects
- NYSP2I provides environmental design education to toy design students at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
- NYSP2I assisted a New York State children’s furniture manufacturer to replace their current crib bite guard and mattress cover materials with materials with a lower environmental impact. NYSP2I identified alternative products, created a set of metrics and evaluated alternatives, and assisted the company in the conversion process. The company has successfully switched to new, lower environmental footprint products and eliminated the use of approximately 7,000 pounds of hazardous material each year. Children’s Furniture case study
- NYSP2I staff works with national companies to design environmentally preferable products. This includes developing product specific environmental metrics, comparing multiple product design concepts, comparing company and competitor products, and understanding the environmental impacts of products in order to drive product design decisions.