Engineering for “radical” resource efficiency

From manufacturing to disposal, nearly every product made uses resources and generates waste. Waste means unnecessary cost. Therefore, any opportunity to cut waste saves money.

Many engineers often latch on to what seems to be a solution before appropriately defining a problem. This can be a big issue in product development, where design teams are often located in different silos and assigned narrowly scoped tasks. Engineers tend to get used to solving problems just by repeating techniques and following industry-standard practices. However, such limited approaches can sometimes make situations worse.

A more-effective, but less-familiar, approach is called “whole-systems thinking.” The well-researched method has been used for generations. The basic idea is to analyze and consider the way constituent parts of a system relate to one another, instead of merely focusing on the parts themselves.

The approach encourages engineers to look at design problems from multiple points of view. This provides a deeper understanding of the underlying problem, which, in turn, produces novel solutions that otherwise might never come to light. The key to the whole systems approach is identifying the right problems to solve, well before engineering begins.

The Rocky Mountain Institute
For decades, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Snowmass, Colo., has pushed this integrative approach to design. According to Lovins, designers can actually make a system less efficient even while making each of its parts more efficient. When parts are not designed to work together, they’ll tend to work against each another, he says.

To address this problem, RMI developed a method called “Factor 10 Engineering” (10xE), a set of principles that architects and engineers can use to slash energy use by a factor of 10 compared to baseline examples. Traditional measures rarely produce similar gains in energy efficiency. To encourage whole-systems thinking among new designers, RMI collects case histories of integrative design and lists learning resources for designers.

Often cited in RMI lore is how Atlanta, Ga.-based Interface Carpet’s Chief Engineer Jan Schilham went beyond traditional designs while upgrading the entire piping system of the company’s Shanghai factory. By considering the whole plant, rather than individual pipes, he discovered that large, straight pipes reduced friction so much that the facility could slash its energy use by 86%. Even though big pipes were expensive, their costs were recouped in only seven days because of higher efficiency. Large, straight pipes made it easier to optimize pipe layouts as well as avoid the traditional “spaghetti” of angled pipes and the resultant need for more pumping energy.