North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
By Shelly Severinghaus, EARTHSHIFT and Robin Tindal, Hypertherm
Often there are a handful of questions that a company gets asked on a regular basis by its employees and customers regarding the environmental performance of their product. Which material is environmentally preferable? Where are the majority of the impacts coming from? What can we do to reduce those impacts? Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology that helps companies answer these questions.
All products and services have life cycle phases where material and energy are consumed and waste and emissions are created. An LCA is a scientific method for analyzing the environmental impacts associated with the life cycle of a product, from cradle-to-grave. The impacts include those from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacturing, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling. The impact categories include climate change, human health, ecosystem quality, resources and more. LCA enables the identification of the life cycle stages or processes which contribute significantly to the environmental impacts.
With so many environmental methodologies out there, why do an LCA?
Hypertherm, an industrial cutting solutions firm based in Hanover, New Hampshire, has been conducting LCAs since 2012. Here are their top three reasons:
Reason #1Conducting an LCA helps prioritize.
LCA identifies “hot spots,” or where the majority of the environmental impacts are coming from. It may be a life cycle stage, particular component, or processing step. Hypertherm recognizes the need to prioritize voluntary impact reduction alongside new product development, and the LCA results allows the company to focus its efforts on the biggest impacts. Another focus area might be areas with big impact that the company feels it can actually control and change.. An example is with its HyPerformance HPR plasma cutting systems. The LCA results showed that the majority of the impacts are from the scrap produced while cutting. Therefore, Hypertherm has been working with its ProNestnesting software team to minimize scrap production in the first place. The company also learned that use phase electricity consumption is a driver of impacts, so it is researching ways to reduce electricity usage, while maintaining the same or better performance.
Reason #2By incorporating LCA early on in the design process, changes can be made at the lowest possible complexity and lowest cost.
Around 80% of environmental impacts are “locked in” during ideation and design stages. Therefore, the earlier an LCA is integrated into product development, the more influence you can have in lowering the environmental impacts, and it is much less expensive to do so at this phase. Hypertherm has started conducting LCA for key products at the early stages of R&D. This allows product designers and engineers to ask questions about which material has fewer environmental impacts, and the effects of making components more durable.
Figure 1: Life Cycle Assessment and Product Development. Source: http://ec.europa.eu/energy/efficiency/ecodesign/eco_design_en.htm
Reason #3 Conducting LCAs allows you to ask “what if” questions and try out different usage models or materials before committing to it.
By using LCA, Hypertherm is able to see the results of scenario analyses and what factors are the most influential in reducing the overall environmental impacts. Hypertherm has been able to evaluate transportation modes like oceanic vs. air freight, recycling vs. landfilling at a product’s end of life, virgin vs. recycled copper, packaging options and more.
Life cycle assessment is a powerful methodology to evaluate the environmental impacts over the life of a product or service. An LCA can help answer many questions about where the hot spots are, how one material or product compares to another and where there are tradeoffs.
How can you see your organization using LCA?
Join us during FABTECH Session F47: Automating the Shop Floor and Reducing Lead Time, November 17, 2016 from 8:00 -10:00 AM to answer burning questions. Learn more here.
About the authors
Shelly Severinghaus is an experienced, environmentally focused professional with a passion for educating organizations about the impacts of their choices and their products. While guiding organizations towards more sustainable solutions, she helps improve their triple bottom line, create a competitive advantage, enhance their brand and lower risks. She is a project manager for EARTHSHIFT, a leading sustainability consultancy, focused on life cycle assessment (LCA) and business sustainability, working with Fortune 500 companies, government bodies and institutional clients. She splits her time between conducting LCAs and critical reviews, overseeing EARTHSHIFT’s training program, as well as teaching and developing applied LCA courses.
Robin Tindall serves as Hypertherm’s Environmental Stewardship Manager, integrating environmental stewardship along the entire value chain. Her efforts are central to Hypertherm’s mission of reducing the environmental impact of everything it does. Guided by an aggressive 2020 sustainability dashboard, Robin touches upon all aspects of the business beginning with product design, supply and operations, to end use and product end of life. Under Robin’s watch, Hypertherm’s landfill waste is down to just 7% today; electricity consumption is down 10% percent. A trained environmental engineer with a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and an MBA, Robin’s experience stretches 19 years.
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
