Design for sustainability and the environment spans far beyond recyclability. Through careful design it is possible to significantly reduce impact of development and manufacture well before a product or device is ready for recycling. HD offers a range of services which for sustainability, from Design for the Circular Economy to product sustainability reports.
HD designs and engineers new products and medical devices which are the best they possibly can be and which are responsible from an environmental standpoint. Throughout a project we consider materials, processes and the impact they can make, we discuss this throughout to ensure you can make better decisions and reduce environmental impact for your own company too.
By working with HD you can take advantage of our ethos of reducing the impact of development and manufacturing through choosing materials, processes and industrial partners which minimise waste both for the product and it’s packaging too. HD’s design and engineering team have expertise in numerous areas of sustainable design so have built a network of further experts with specialisms in this field to support our clients throughout the development and manufacturing process.
Whether you would like to improve the sustainability of an existing product or develop a novel device, we have the knowledge to guide and inform your development with lower environmental impact.
Product Portfolio Strategy | We can help map out your future product development roadmap across the entire range of your product portfolio, and even help you develop products that aim to address potential new issues that your products create.
Product Design Brief / Specification Verification | We can help you develop a thorough, well defined product design brief and/or specification that aims to address whether or not something can be done, but rather, should it be done?
Product Concept Judgement Evaluation | We can help evaluate your product concepts with a systematic quantitative approach, to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each concept design, not just the technical or commercial impact, but the environmental impact too.
Life Cycle Analysis | We can conduct Life Cycle Analysis of existing products, or products that are very close to market release, to aim to understand the full environmental impact from material extraction, refinement, processing, manufacturing, assembly, delivery, packaging, use, waste, recycling, and feedback mechanisms.
Environmental Impact 99 (EI99) Evaluation | We can aid you throughout the entire product development process to evaluate the products environmental impact, alert you of any high risk areas, and implement technical and commercial corrective action to mitigate environmental risk before your product reaches market.
End-of-Life Product Waste Management | We can aid you in developing programmes to help control how your product is disposed of appropriately, whether it being trade-back services or consumer instructions, etc. in order to aim to eliminate any non-circular wasteful output.
Appropriate Material Selection | We can utilise our internal expertise in materials knowledge, and also our extensive network of external material development engineers and scientists, to define the performance specifications for each part, and aid in the selection of appropriate materials.
Design for Longevity and Robustness | We can ensure that your product is fit for real-world use by designing it with longevity and robustness in mind. We can utilise our internal expertise in Finite Element Analysis to digitally verify that parts can withstand drop tests, have strong elements and linkages where needed, and reduce materials thickness where not, before a single part is made.
Packaging Analysis | We can review your existing packaging design, break it down into material use, processing requirements, product protection levels, its product to packaging density, and review its environmental impact.
Product Teardown Analysis | We can conduct Product Teardowns of your products, or your competitors to independently evaluate the true energy/material requirements of each part and study the processes required to produce such a product.
Eco-Passports | We can produce ‘Eco-Passports’ – one page consumer facing datasheet to convey the products environmental impact, and detail what types of recyclable materials are used, and educate the consumer regarding what your company has done to reduce it’s environmental impact.
Procurement Evaluation | We can work with your internal procurement team and aim to map out the realistic full spectrum of each parts environmental impact using true real-world data. We not only discover where your parts are made, but where the parts to make the parts are made, and where those parts to make the parts to make the parts are made!
Product Environmental Reports | We can conduct a thorough Product Environmental Report utilising several of the tools listed above to produce a history of the design efforts that went into the research and development to mitigate the risk of product environmental impact.
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