On February 25th, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) announced the selection of projects for the inaugural lifecycle assessment plus universities (LCA+U) challenge, a joint project between ESW and Sustainable Minds. The LCA+U challenge encourages student members of ESW to work with campus staff and sustainability lifecycle assessment software to identify solutions or improvements to campus operations that have quantifiably lower environmental impacts.

The six participating universities are Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of British Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. “These projects give our students a chance to explore alternatives that will really make an impact on their universities. We are tackling problems ranging from take-out food containers to building energy use and transport of organic material to compost locations, and are excited to use our partnership with Sustainable Minds to show campus leaders how they can truly have a positive impact through their decisions,” said Rob Best, Projects Director for ESW.

Jon Keng, Mercyanne Andes, Millali Marcano, and Sunyoung Bang are students in the Tufts Gordon Institute Masters in Engineering Management program. As a part of the program, students are engaged in short-term consulting projects to allow them to experience real-world challenges. They chose Sustainable Minds as their sponsor company for their summer practicum project.

Vers founder, David Laituri, clearly knows what it means to create a more sustainable product. One of his philosophies is the concept of ‘Chi-eco’ (pronounced chee-co). A customer buys a Vers product because of design and performance first (chic), and environmental performance second (eco). This philosophy truly helped Vers’ recent Kickstarter campaign achieve a 1946% funding goal and raise almost $200,000. David certainly knows how use ‘greener’ to drive product innovation that leads to new revenues.

When the team first met David, we were impressed by his extensive experience with product manufacturing and deep interest in sustainability. Every Vers component and process was already developed with sustainability in mind. It was a challenge: how can we improve on an already lean, sustainable design? Working with the team at Sustainable Minds has expanded our applicability of sustainability in product design and development. The key is to look at all of the phases of a product’s life cycle.

On August 28th, we held the third in a series of webcasts that feature educators from leading colleges and universities demonstrating how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. Sustainable Minds merges practice and science, ecodesign and LCA. This webcast showcases three educators and practitioners – teaching materials, industrial design and geography – demonstrating their success stories. Educators with different expertise can use Sustainable Minds to teach lifecycle thinking through hands-on experience.

On May 24, we held the second in a series of webcasts that feature educators from leading colleges and universities demonstrating how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. This webcast showcases the creativity of two engineering and manufacturing educators discussing how they got started integrating Sustainable Minds into current projects and courses, and how they developed new ones. They reported not only a very high level of student engagement and enthusiasm, but a clear impact on students’ improved job marketability.