House of Lords - Science and Technology

Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence

Supplementary memorandum by the Sustainable Development Group of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining

MATERIALS AND RESOURCE EFFICIENCY

What data could be made available to designers and engineers to assist them in developing innovative products and processes which create less waste?

There are two main requirements for engineering data to support the whole-life approach of the Integrated Product Policy (IPP) of the European Commission:

1. Design and manufacturing data should accompany a complex product throughout its life so that its End-of-Life (EoL) phase can be properly managed. Lifetimes of these products are longer than the lifetime of the software systems that were used in their design and manufacture. This requires standardised computer representations for product data that are independent of proprietary software. Such standards are provided by applications of ISO 10303: Product data representation and exchange and by the other standards developed by ISO Technical Committee 184, Sub-committee 4 (ISO TC184/SC4).

2. Data that can be used to estimate the impact on the environment of the product throughout its life and to support design decisions that minimise waste.

There are two main lifecycle stages where waste is generated—as a consequence of the manufacturing process at the beginning of life (BoL waste), and at the end of a life stage (EoL waste). All engineering processes aim to reduce waste at the processing stage for economic reasons. Some guidance is needed for those designers who are not embedded in a manufacturing company of the waste reduction potential of different production methods. Data for environmental impact and typical waste fractions are needed on more manufacturing technologies such as casting and forging, as examples. Some of the data needed for evaluating the environmental impacts of inputs and outputs, both for the local process and for the background effects in life cycle assessment, is becoming available in the ELCD system of the European Commission for several common product families, eg steel sections and steel sheet, aluminium sheet and aluminium extrusions, etc. Possibly, the DEFRA Research Program on Production Management Methods will also provide data for common environmental impact situations that will be easier for UK companies to understand and to take into account in their design of new products.

The DEPUIS project, funded by the European Commission (www.depuis.enea.it) is developing distance learning methods, accessible via the Internet, to achieve a synthesis between these two technologies and is aimed at increasing the awareness and knowledge of designers and engineers of methods to support life cycle thinking.

Measures such as "total raw materials used per kg of product" are used in some manufacturing plants, and "atom efficiency" or "e-factor" can be used in the chemical sector. How widespread is the use of such measures and are they effective at enabling businesses to recognise the amount of waste they produce?

Data based on kg is more relevant to the engineering manufacture of discrete products. The other measures may be more appropriate for continuous stream production, such as in chemical processes.

The Materials And Design Exchange (MADE) is bringing together the design and materials communities in order to "stimulate innovation, promote the transfer of materials knowledge and improve the competitiveness of UK business". What response has there been towards this exchange from the design and materials communities and what are the benefits for members?

— MADE is the design node of the Materials KTN and is funded by the UK Government through the Technology Strategy Board.

— MADE magazine is published 3 times a year and reaches over 4000 readers. An article on packaging design appears in each issue.

— Made events have included:

— On average IoM3 organises 6 MADE workshops a year, each attracting about 60 delegates. So far this year we have run three of these; Aluminium in the Living Environment (45 people attended), Waste Not! Want Not! (about recycling and reuse—67 people attended) and Beating Around the Bush! (about Natural Materials 57 people attended).

— Exhibition stands. This year we have spoken to about 1000 people over three days at the Surface Design Show in Islington.

— Two Royal College of Art run discussions per year.

— One Design Council led evening lecture per year.

— A large presence at the London Design Festival

— We have over 1000 online members, though we expect the remainder 3000 who receive the magazine to sign up over time.

— We have had 17 SPARK award applications; a £5000 award to pay for proof of concept testing given to designers who are working with a material in a novel way or a novel material. So far two have been completed, three are currently going ahead, six are set to go ahead for the future.

— A Materials Resource Centre holding about 1000 materials samples. Since opening in September 2007, we have had over 100 visitors, some in groups of 10—20 people. These tend to be groups of students from universities, whereas design professionals visit alone or combine MADE events with visits.

— An electronic newsletter reaching over 1000 designers.

We appeal to the whole of the materials community from academics to producers and consultants. We have had contact with product designers, furniture designers, architects, fashion designers and beyond. We also visit as many design college end of year shows every year, to spread the word and engage with the students.

The conclusion is that MADE has achieved a strong link between product designers and materials engineers and that the issues of sustainability and waste reduction have been a prominent part of their activities.

What are the priority materials that have a negative environmental impact but which have not yet been replaced by more sustainable options due to technical difficulties?

One obvious example is the use of lead solder in printed circuit assemblies. The large global manufacturers have now been able to replace the lead solder with tin/silver/copper (SAC) alloys but the processes are more complicated and require better knowledge and understanding of the consequences of the changes than would be available to technicians and repair-men. There are other consequences of the RoHS and REACH Directives that may require new metallurgical developments and it is not clear where these can be found. There is also the example that the replacement of halogen gases in refrigerators produced a by-product that was a potent green-house gas and this had to be anticipated and specially treated.

EDUCATION

To what extent is sustainability and waste reduction included in the curricula for young designers and engineers? Should undergraduate courses include a broad overview of sustainability, or should there be focussed courses for Masters and Doctoral programmes?

The Engineering Council embraces and includes sustainability within three of its five Learning Outcomes—Design; Economic, Social and Environmental Issues; and Engineering Practice that are expected of all Accreditable education & training programmes.

Sustainability is cited specifically within the IoM3 Prospectus as one of the Institute's eight broad activity areas in addressing the Materials Cycle as recycling and sustainability. The topic is therefore fundamental to the Institute and an imperative for professional recognition.

Universities and colleges, in seeking Accreditation of their education and training programmes via the IoM3, have to meet certain criteria, criteria which also are recognised (and demanded) by the Engineering Council, and fully embrace these Learning Outcomes.

IoM3 Accredits programmes at various academic levels, and issues specific Guidelines for intending FE/HE establishments. These Guidelines address the learning requirements for programmes leading to EngTech, IEng or CEng Registration, via qualifications such as National Certificate or Diploma in Science or Engineering/C & G Higher Professional Diploma in Engineering/Apprenticeship Framework Certificate; Foundation Degrees; BEng; BEng(H); and MEng.

Guidelines have also been prepared for Accreditable Further Learning Schemes, which embrace all of the above sub-degree, and degree level programmes, plus postgraduate programmes such as MSc/ MRes/EngDoc. For each set of Institute Accreditation Guidelines, a matching Proforma has been prepared for intending applicants seeking Accreditation to complete. Each of these Guidelines Documents explains about the Learning Outcomes and, through the Proforma requires FE/HE establishments to address these requirements, including recycling and sustainability.

Several Universities also provide Masters Courses for more specific training and specialisation in sustainability and the reduction in waste through design. The DEPUIS project (see Question 1) will support continued professional education.

The Packaging Society, part of IoM3, is revising its textbook on packaging design to include sustainability and recycling and to emphasise its importance along with Protection, Information and Anti-counterfeiting.

Comment from Dr.Mark Jolly (University of Birmingham):

It is my opinion that sustainability should be embedded into engineering programmes. Despite the requirements of the Engineering Council UK to demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of sustainability issues, from my experience, most academic programmes really only pay lip service to this. This is probably more the case in the research oriented universities because the majority of the academics are interested in research which is an intellectual challenge that does not necessarily include sustainability. They have not "bought-in" to the sustainability story. It is essential that such academics are somehow "encouraged" to include sustainability on their teaching and research—the best way to do this is somehow provide a financial incentive which is added to their basic research in someway. I see this as quite a challenge.

RE-USE OF MATERIALS

What dialogue is there between waste processing companies and designers of materials, components and products and how successful has it been in reducing the amount of waste created by products throughout their life-cycles?

The concept of design also applies to primary products such as steel. As an example from the steel sector, the Acelor steel company in Luxembourg developed relationships with their local scrap supply chain in order to reduce the amount of copper that was included in the scrap. The recycling of Aluminium beverage cans, of which this Committee will have already heard, is another example of a good link between the management of waste and the recycling of aluminium to a specified quality.

There are many examples from the automotive sector where there are four key factors:

Directives and legislation require OEMs to take producer responsibility for the amount of material that is recovered from a vehicle at the end-of-life (ELV);

OEMS control the whole supply chain for components and the creation of new organisations such as AutoGreen and Cartakeback have been licensed by the OEMs and have the resources to process the ELV for dismantling in a systematic manner;

Designers in the OEMs are an integral part of the manufacturing process and not an add-on extra;

The need to design for increased dismantling as a result of the increase from 85% to 95% in the amount of the vehicle that is to be recovered.

The greatest problem is with plastics that are an increasing part of the vehicle construction as part of the need to reduce weight. New designs of components now use fewer types and grades of plastic materials and are designed for easy removal on dismantling. Nissan have shown that it is possible to make all their engineering plastic components from Polypropylene. Many OEMs are demonstrating that recovered plastic materials can achieve the specifications needed for re-use as engineered components.

There are initiatives from The Packaging Society for collections and incineration with renewable energy and the start of a non-recyclable waste conversion project with BRE.

One objective should be to aim for a long working life and for components that can be refurbished and re-used wherever possible. However products will reach the end of their useful life and we should then aim to maximise the recovery of the resources. In ancient societies where resources were scarce there was little wastage and valuable materials were effectively recycled. The critical factors are the cost of recovery versus the cost of new materials. Products are usually made from several components made from different materials. Some materials may be compatible for recycling but usually the materials have a higher value if they can be segregated. The important thing for designers to consider is the compatibility of materials in terms of recycling and the ease of dismantling. In the ideal situation the products would be designed to facilitate recycling. Some businesses are moving along the remanufacturing or recycling route, such as Xerox, Caterpillar and Sony.

What novel technologies can be used to separate raw materials from mixed waste streams and what consideration needs to be taken of these technologies during the design stage of a product?

Research into methods for the separation and recovery of plastics was started at the University of Liverpool in the 1970s. Argonne National Laboratory in the USA has developed discriminating flotation techniques sensitive enough to be able to separate grades of plastic materials. The feasibility of separating lead, brass, zinc and non-magnetic alloys from mixed waste streams by a thermal method has been demonstrated by a DTI SMART Award and is the subject of a UK Patent. This has advantages over shipping the mixed waste to the Far East for hand-sorting.

There is also the need to investigate how materials can be separated before they get into mixed waste streams, eg by using novel methods of `disbonding' parts of components by using novel technologies, such as adhesives that contain thermally expandable microspheres, or carbon nanotubes or ceramic nanoparticles that allow joints to be disbonded cleanly and provide high value materials for reuse, recycling etc. In 1998-2000 Ferroday Ltd demonstrated the use of RFID tags to carry more information on the material constituents of components and holds a UK Patent on this method. With RFID tags the problem is to design the location of the tag so that it will not be damaged in use and to ensure that it can be present and detected in the recovery cycle.

Colour analysis can sort different types of glass packaging and such a facility is to be installed at Beatson Clark at Rotherham.

If materials are scarce or valuable they are usually recovered. Metals for example have usually had significant value and the technology for recovering them is well known. Nevertheless if these are disperse in complex matrices or in complex composites the cost of recovery might exceed the current value. In low cost societies manual sorting has been the simple technique used for initial separation/sorting processes. However this is not viable when labour costs are high so higher technology methods have been developed and can be used for quite complex separation processes (a Norwegian company has developed a range of automated devices for the automatic sorting of different material mixtures—these are based on a range of different sensor systems and PLC control of the segregation method). So in short, materials can be recovered from mixtures if they are valuable enough.

However it would be more efficient if designs could facilitate the segregation of materials into streams that are either easy to sort or compatible for recycling.

What research is being conducted into the barriers that prevent companies from making use of existing technology and materials which might enable waste reduction?

The main focus of this enquiry is on how to minimise waste from the design stage—rather than what to do with waste that is generated from current practices. This is a very perceptive approach because it has the potential to lead to the most significant gains. The UK can establish a global position if it invests in sustainable design. To do this all stakeholders (designers, scientists, engineers, manufacturers and end users) must have a better appreciation of sustainability. Sustainable education issues are important. The old "Silo" mentality of engineering (Civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic, materials, IT, etc) could not address whole of life issues, environmental issues were often tacked on at the end of the process. Scientists and Engineers must have a broader perspective and must be able to collaborate in design teams.

There is no magic formula for sustainability—we will not achieve it by a single piece of legislation or policy. The move towards sustainability must be a process of continuous improvement—of course we need to deal with the end-of life material from current production methods but we stand to gain the most by participating in the development of more sustainable designs. One of the barriers will be that businesses have already sunk costs in established designs and manufacturing processes. Government can support step-change developments by encouraging businesses to be more innovative (TSB, KTNs, KTPs etc) but businesses need to be convinced that governmental policies are long term and that they have cross party support- so that they are not re-engineered after every election. With the widespread concerns about global warming it should be possible to achieve a common approach towards sustainability.

There is no central planning and coordination of strategy for the collection of packaging waste. There is a need to reduce the emphasis on landfill and local authorities need guidance on a central method of working and the public need better explanations of the issues. There is a need to analyse the success of efforts elsewhere in Europe and in the USA to decide on the best way forward.

REGULATION

The Waste Framework Directive is currently being revised and offers an opportunity to introduce a formal definition of by-products. Do you think that such a definition would help to clarify the distinction between unusable waste and usable by-products, and would it enable businesses to be more efficient with their resources?

An improved definition of waste, to be able to distinguish between by-products with a potential further use and unusable waste, was a recommendation of the written submission to the Sub-Committee.

Part of the problem is that the word "Waste" has a negative connotation. So once a material has been defined as a waste it is difficult to overcome the perception that it has no value. However the EU probably decided to go for a simple definition of Waste to avoid the complex task of deciding on a case by case basis if a material is a waste or a by-product. If a material is defined as a Waste then it must be managed as such and this brings along a significant administrative burden.

The legislators want to prevent businesses defining their residues as by-products if in reality they have no potential to be utilised. The legislative issue arises from the point at which a material is defined as a waste. Is it by its very nature a waste or is it a waste if no-body can use it in an economically viable way?

The EA in the UK has promised to listen to the business view on the management of by-products from their operations. In some specific cases it has been agreed that materials are not considered to be wastes (eg Blast Furnace Slag). In others the situation has been more complex and has the potential to reduce the utilisation of secondary materials (eg Fly Ash).

We need to consider what we are trying to achieve through the legislation. We want to ensure that businesses manage the residues from their operations in a responsible manner. Any hazardous materials should be managed in an appropriate way and any other materials should be managed in the most sustainable way. Every effort should be made to re-use secondary materials but it would not make sense if the environmental impact of re-use was greater than that of safe disposal. This is why the concept of Industrial Ecology is important. It may not be viable, in an economic or environmental sense, to transport by-products over long distances but where there are aggregations of industries in close proximity may be able to make beneficial use of each others by-products. The NISP organisation fosters relationships between businesses that can interact to their mutual benefit.

It is important to use Life Cycle Thinking because this will impact on where businesses locate and will address how the products can be managed effectively at the end of life. Material selection and methods of assembly which are decided at the design stage have a significant impact on the potential for resource efficient management at the end-of-life.

SUSTAINABLE DATA FOR WASTE MANAGEMENT

The standardised computer representation of product and process data is important for the whole—life approach of Integrated Product Policy (IPP) of the European Commission because:

— technical data is generated by, and stored in, computer application software;

— this data has to be shared and exchanged in current working practice between many different organisations with many different systems and applications and with many different methods of working;

— the data may have to be conserved for longer than the lifetime of any computer system or software application for long life products;

— the data needs to be understood and used in the future by unknown systems.

Product data technology using open International Standards has been developed by the global manufacturing sector in order to solve these problems. The technology has been developed over the last 20 years by the ISO Committee TC184/SC4[2] in a cooperative effort involving hundreds of engineers from all of the world's major manufacturing nations and most of the world's industrial sectors. Its applications are used in automobile, aerospace, chemical plant, defence, offshore oil and gas and shipbuilding. British engineers have played a major role in this development.

The use of open standards for the representation of product and process data presents a new concept for the communication of information by computerised methods. Every computer software system is unique in its internal organisation of its data and also in the internal identifications that are assigned to the data items—the software data model. Direct transfer of data from one system for use by a different software system will fail because the receiving system will try to interpret the transferred data according to its own internal data model, which will be different. The use of data produced by one software system by a different software system requires the conversion from one data model to the other. However for many-to-many direct communications between n different data models there would be need to be n(n-1) separate data conversion interfaces so that each software system would be able to interpret between any of the different models of the data that it could receive.

The standards that are the basis of product data technology include:

ISO 10303 Product data representation and exchange (STEP)

ISO 13584 Parts libraries (PLIB)

ISO 15926 Reference data libraries

The objective of these standards is to provide a neutral mechanism capable of describing product and process data throughout the life-cycle of a product, independently from any particular software system. Information represented by the standards from ISO TC184/SC4 reduces the costs of developing special data formats and individual file translators between alternative systems.

These standard specifications provide a data framework (information model) for both the structure (syntax) and the meaning (semantics) of the information, as well as a data format for the data files (ISO 10303-21). They provide the means for data interchange between different systems by file transfer and for long term archiving for the conservation of the information because both the syntax and the semantics of the information are conserved. All of these standards are written in the EXPRESS language (ISO 10303-11) and can be implemented in software applications to provide a standardised, neutral interface to any computer application or system.

The application of these standards is "Information Engineering"—applying the same engineering principles to product information as are applied to all manufactured products. Information is produced to a specification and quality control and quality assurance ensures that the information is fit for its purpose. Partial or incomplete information can be supplemented with additional information produced to the same specification.

EXAMPLES OF PRODUCT DATA STANDARDS FOR THE WHOLE LIFE-CYCLE

ISO 10303-203: Configuration of 3D designs of mechanical parts and assemblies

This application of ISO 10303 provides the means of communication between different computer-aided design (CAD) systems. It is widely used in the automobile and aerospace industries and is implemented in most commercial CAD systems. ISO 10303-203 is very important for defining the details of the product shape and construction when making decisions for the end-of-life strategy.

ISO 10303-210: Electronic assembly, interconnection and core design

This standard is very important for defining the technical details of electronic products that are subject to the WEEE Directive.

ISO 10303-214: Core data for automobile design processes

ISO 10303-214 is widely used in the German automobile industry. The standard is able to describe the assembly of any product, not only automobiles. Therefore the resources of this standard will be very valuable for specifying the details of complex products for making decisions on the dismantling and disposal at their end-of-life.

ISO 10303-235: Engineering properties for product design and verification

ISO 10303-235 is designed to provide a specification for the data for any property measured by any method. The names and definitions of measurement methods and their associated properties for a particular domain would be defined in dictionaries that conform to ISO 13584. The standard provides an audit trail through the methods used to derive a property and would enable the reliability of a property value to be specified. ISO 10303-235 is designed to specify the computerised representation of environmental data and data from other results, such as nuclear monitoring and disposal, which have to be conserved. The detailed properties of products and their components can also be represented and so the use of this standard would support a supply chain for the provision of data for life cycle assessment.

ISO 10303-239: Product life-cycle support (PLCS)

ISO 10303-239 provides the capability to support all of the information required to design maintenance solutions for a product throughout its life, to track planned and unplanned maintenance based on the actual state of the product and the changing state of the product as components are replaced and repaired. PLCS can also be used to associate technical document and training materials with various valid product configurations. PLCS could be used as the basis for specifying end-of-life strategies for the dismantling and disposal of a complex product.

In all of these cases, the data specified by these standards can accompany a product throughout its life-cycle because the specification of the information is independent from proprietary software.

March 2008

2 http://www.tc184-sc4.org/ Back