The U.S. Department of Commerce's Sustainable Manufacturing Initiative promotes "the creation of manufactured products that use processes that minimize negative environmental impacts, conserve energy and natural resources, are safe for employees, communities, and consumers and are economically sound.”

MAGNET’s Product Design and Development team helps companies design or redesign their products with environmental concerns in mind. A focus on sustainability allows companies to grow by finding financially profitable niches that are missed when the only consideration is profit. At the same time, savings in the areas of energy and materials make a positive impact to the corporate bottom line.

MAGNET's proven 4-D Program Approach has been validated by more than 20 years of consulting for thousands of Northern Ohio manufacturers.

Define: Knowledge building, strategic planning, establishing guiding principles, vision and mission statements.

Discover: Comprehensive sustainability assessment, final report with prioritized action plan for sustainable progress.

Develop: Individual project action plans, goals and objectives; resource needs; timeline with milestones; preliminary business case and project budget.

Deliver: Implementation. This balanced approach helps a company increase top-line growth through increasing market share, building the company's reputation, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing process efficiency. At the same time, bottom-line profits grow by reducing waste disposal costs, electricity usage, water usage, packaging costs and raw material costs.

Designing for Sustainability

MAGNET has partnered with Sustainable Minds to offer a comprehensive and standardized system that allows companies to credibly estimate, evaluate, compare and track the lifecycle, environmental and human health performance of products in the earliest stages of design. MAGNET PDD engineers have been trained to use the Sustainable Minds (SM) system and to train others how to use it.

Key features of the SM service include:

• Optimized for electro-mechanical products, including household appliances, housewares, consumer electronics, industrial and commercial equipment, and outdoor and sporting equipment.
• Use in all stages of concept design, from R&D and screening possible directions to explore, through comparing final concepts.
• Assess any portion of the product, the whole product system, assemblies, sub-assemblies and parts.
• Use before or with computer-aided design (CAD) or product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. Free-standing software can be used to assess the impacts from existing products, and before or while using standard design tools. Interoperates with all CAD tools for bill of materials (BOM) import.
• Combine concept comparisons with real-time lifecycle assessment (LCA) results.
• Comprehensive impact analysis, which includes continually updated impact factors with carbon dioxide-equivalent values. Evaluates 10 environmental impact categories, including global warming. For use in North and South America, Asia and Australia.
• Proven and transparent methodology: Data and scientific methodology from trusted sources, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST).
• Useful and understandable reports" Graphic results views make it easy to understand impacts from existing products, and generate new product concepts that exponentially improve environmental performance.

To find out how a MAGNET's Design Engineers can help you develop sustainable and profitable new products, contact MAGNET today!