CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
11 September 2008
Product News
Sustainable Minds Teams With Autodesk to Address Growing Sustainable Product Design Market Opportunity
Sustainable Minds announced it has entered into a strategic relationship with Autodesk, Inc. (http://www.autodesk.com/pr-autodesk).
As part of the collaboration, Sustainable Minds plans to develop software and information services that interoperate with the Autodesk solution for Digital Prototyping(http://www.autodesk.com/pr-digitalprototyping), which will give industrial designers and engineers the knowledge and tools required to understand the environmental impacts of a new product.
"Our relationship with Sustainable Minds illustrates Autodesk's commitment to driving awareness and adoption of sustainable design," said Robert "Buzz" Kross, senior vice president of Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions. "Sustainable Minds' design decision support software, combined with Autodesk Inventor (http://www.autodesk.com/pr-inventor), can make a positive difference to product environmental impact and ultimately, the world in which we live."
"Leveraging Autodesk's worldwide customer reach and reputation among designers and manufacturers will allow us to quickly bring sustainable product design into the mainstream in an accessible and empowering way," said Terry Swack, CEO and co-founder of Sustainable Minds. "For the first time, product design teams will be able to estimate the environmental and human health impacts of their design decisions and have quantitative results early in the concept stage, so that they can design greener products from the start -- before considerable time, cost and resources are irreversibly committed."
Market and regulatory pressures today require that manufacturers improve the environmental performance of their products. In addition to the sustainable product design expertise and industry information currently available on its Web site, SustainableMinds.com, the company will offer an on-demand software and information suite that enables designers to estimate a product's life cycle impact using the Okala life cycle assessment methodology. This method models ten environmental and human health impact categories (or just global warming impacts, measured in CO2 equivalents) and combines them into a single impact factor value that models a product's overall potential environmental performance.
This life cycle assessment software will complement Autodesk Inventor software -- the foundation for Digital Prototyping that produces accurate 3D models for the validation of a design's fit, form and function before it is physically built. Sustainable Minds life cycle assessment software is expected to benefit end users in a wide range of professions, including industrial designers and engineers, sustainability managers, product managers, marketers, design consultancies and manufacturing companies who are championing sustainable products or responsible for complying with sustainability requirements.
BigToys, Inc., a manufacturer of environmentally friendly commercial playground equipment, makes significant use of recycled, recyclable and renewable materials. Autodesk Inventor software plays a vital role in helping BigToys design its environmentally friendly play structures. "Taking sustainability into account during the product design phase is imperative," said Tim Madeley, president and owner of BigToys. "We're already using digital prototyping to create a safer, more environmentally friendly play space today. The ability to understand and lessen the environmental footprint of our 100% recycled products is fundamental to our business."
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