Perspectives on greener product development and manufacturing from Sustainable Minds, our partners, customers and contributors.

Supply chain

Webcast: Creating Knowledge Workers for the Greener Product Marketplace, Part 2: Getting Started

By Sustainable Minds on June 12, 2012

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.

Webcast: Creating Knowledge Workers for the Greener Product Marketplace, Part 1

By Sustainable Minds on May 9, 2012

3 Schools / 3 Disciplines / 3 Educators
On April 24, we held the first in a series of webcasts on how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. Featuring three educators from three different disciplines at three leading institutions, each demonstrated and discussed the use of Sustainable Minds in their curriculum, expansion in their programs and the implications for the future. The range of disciplines represented by the presenters illustrates the interest and need for teaching life cycle thinking and action to all types of students – business, design and engineering – to prepare them for taking on the challenges and opportunities in the greener product economy.

Innovating Greener Product Curriculum

By Sustainable Minds on March 28, 2012

CUSTOMER STORY WEBCAST SERIES 
Tues, April 24 at 2pm ET, 11am PT

Creating Knowledge Workers for the Greener Product Marketplace
3 Schools | 3 Disciplines | 3 Educators

WHAT: On April 24th, three prominent business, design and engineering educators will address an increasingly important challenge: How to integrate environmental sustainability into product development education to prepare students for jobs in the greener economy.

NEW: Custom Data Creation Program. Have it your way.

By Sustainable Minds on February 3, 2012

Add the life cycle data you need to model the environmental performance of your products.

Sustainable Minds enables product development teams to rapidly model the environmental performance of products in the earliest stages of R&D. Today, as environmental performance increasingly drives product innovation and differentiation, using industry average data is often not good enough. Manufacturers want data specific to their business processes and supply chain. SM’s unique cloud & service delivery means data can continually be updated and new data added so product teams have what they need, when they need it.

“Maybe the perfect cloud solution?” Al Dean, Executive Editor, DEVELOP3D

Our dataset grows as our customers grow. Now it's easy to request and add impact factors for the life cycle data you need to model your products. Use the Data Browser to view the current dataset and the SM Data Request Form to submit your requests. We help you describe and source, then verify and add the data you need for:

Announcing Strategic Customer Win: Spartech Standardizes Product Development and Commercialization Teams on Sustainable Minds

By Sustainable Minds on September 20, 2011

Collaboration Creates Comprehensive Data Set for Plastics Processors

Cambridge, MA – September 20, 2011 – Sustainable Minds, the industry leader in on-demand, eco-concept modeling and life cycle assessment software for product development and manufacturing, today announced new strategic customer, Spartech Corporation. Spartech, a leader in the development and design of rigid packaging, is using Sustainable Minds on-demand software to quickly quantify the environmental impacts associated with the production of their products. By entering information about the product’s attributes, Sustainable Minds software calculates the life cycle environmental impacts for air, land, water and human health, as well as carbon footprint.

Spartech Celebrates Grand Opening of New Technology & Innovation Center

By Sustainable Minds on September 19, 2011

On August 17, 2011, Spartech launched its new R&D facility. Sustainable Minds CEO had the pleasure of attending the event. This facility was designed expressly for Spartech to collaborate with partners and customers in early stage product development to create more sustainable products. Additional information can be found at http://www.spartech.com/08-17-11-tech-center.html

Al Dean, DEVELOP3D, says about SM 2.0: "It doesn't get much better than this."

By Sustainable Minds on August 11, 2011

This is a repost of Al Dean's review of Sustainable Minds 2.0.
Read the review on DEVELOP3D >
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly pushing towards the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS). Al Dean takes a look at one of the industry’s pioneers.

Life Cycle Assessment is a corner-stone of any environmentally aware organisation’s toolkit, but there’s one serious issue if you’re looking to both integrate environmental impact assessment as part of your design process - particularly at the early stages.

Many of the historical solutions are mono- lithic systems targetting in-depth, expert led analyses once a product is complete. As such, they aren’t suited to the rapid fire, often quick and dirty conceptualisation and product development process.

Into this comes Sustainable Minds (SM) and its cloud-based service.

Hot stuff from ICFF 2011

By Sustainable Minds on May 31, 2011

Reposted from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt blog.

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair is a fun place to visit each year for new trends and ideas in commercial design.

Sustainability was a hot theme in the school projects represented at the ICFF: ICFF School

One project in particular highlights a rising trend in product design and marketing. The product-design program of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts challenged students to develop a piece of furniture out of a single sheet of plywood. While the brief was interesting enough, flat-pack design is not new. The important twist here was a lifecycle analysis (LCA) of each design, comparing the furniture on various metrics such as materials, fasteners, glues, and shipping volume, using software by Sustainable Minds. It was fascinating to see how each design had greater or fewer impacts based on decisions such as having a flat or a curved seat. What if every product in this year’s ICFF had undergone the same LCA?

Read more >

Available now – SM Release 2.0 is all about data!

By Sustainable Minds on April 26, 2011

Sustainable Minds enables product development teams to rapidly model the environmental performance of new product concepts in the earliest stages of design. Key to this process is to have access to a broad and deep set of current life cycle environmental impact data. Science improves and so does the data. Sustainable Minds’ SaaS delivery means data can continually be updated and new data added so product teams have what they need, when they need it.

1. Introducing the SM2011 Methodology – The science inside our software
2. Custom impact factor creation service
3. Sustainable Minds Private SaaS – for custom and proprietary datasets

New in SM r2.0:

Sustainable Minds and Eco Innovators Partner to Advance Greener Product Design for Australian Manufacturers

By Sustainable Minds on March 16, 2011

Sustainable Minds today announced a partnership with Melbourne-based environmental consultancy, Eco Innovators to bring Sustainable Minds Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software to Australian product manufacturers, designers, educational institutes and sustainability consultancies to meet the growing demand for product environmental performance information.

With the impending tax on carbon and the increased authority of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to prosecute false environmental claims, Australian manufacturers are looking to credibly measure and manage the environmental performance of their products.

Director of Eco Innovators, Leyla Acaroglu, recent Melbourne Design Award recipient, was responsible for the development of one of the first simplified online LCA tools – Greenfly. “I have had a great deal of experience with designing tools and resources to assist designers in integrating sustainability into product development, and for me, Sustainable Minds LCA software is the best on the market for supporting designers, manufacturers and product developers in understanding and reducing the life cycle impacts of their products.”