Furniture Design Ideas

Products, like organisms, have a life, during the course of which they inter­act with their environment. Their environment is also ours; if the interac­tion is a damaging one, it diminishes the quality of life of all who share it. Life-cycle assessment is the study and analysis of this interaction, quantifying the resources consumed and the […]

The need, as we’ve already said, is for an assessment strategy that addresses current concerns and combines acceptable cost burden with sufficient pre­cision to guide decision making. The strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate future refinement and simple enough to allow rapid "What if?" exploration of alternatives. To achieve this goal, it is necessary […]

Emerging legislation imposes ever-increasing demands on manufactur­ers for eco-accountability. The EU Directive 2005/32/EC on Energy Using Products (EuPs), for example, requires that manufacturers of EuPs must demonstrate "that they have considered the use of energy in their products as it relates to materials, manufacture, packaging, transport, use and end of life." This sounds horribly like […]

Formal methods for LCA first emerged in a series of meetings organized by the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), of which the most significant were held in 1991 and 1993. This led, from 1997 on, to a set of standards for conducting an LCA, issued by the International Standards Organization (ISO 14040 and […]

The idea of a life cycle has its roots in the biological sciences. Living organ­isms are born; they develop, mature, grow old, and, ultimately, die. The progression is inherent in the organism—all follow the same path—but the way the organism develops on the way and its behavior and influence depend on its interaction with its […]

Manufacture Resources Use Disposal 3.1 Introduction and synopsis The materials of engineering have a life cycle. They are created from ores and feedstock. These are manufactured into products that are distributed and used. Like us, products have a finite life, at the end of which they become scrap. The materials they contain, however, are still […]

Growing global population and prosperity increase the demand for energy and materials. The growth in demand is approximately exponential, meaning that consumption grows at a rate that is proportional to its current value; for most materials it is between 3% and 6% per year. Exponential growth has a number of consequences. One is that consumption […]

The materials on which industry depends are drawn, very largely, from the Earth’s reserves of minerals. A mineral reserve, R, is defined as that part of a known mineral deposit that can be extracted legally and economically at the time it is determined. It is natural to assume that reserves describe the total quantity of […]

A modern industrialized state is extremely complex, heavily dependent on a steady supply of raw materials. Most materials are being produced at a Table 2.2 The water demands of energy Energy source Liters of water per MJ Grid electricity 24 Industrial electricity 11 Energy direct from coal 0.35 Energy direct from oil 0.3 rate that […]

Materials. Speaking globally, we consume roughly 10 billion (1010) tonnes of engineering materials per year, an average of 1.5 tonnes per person, though it is not distributed like that. Figure 2.1 gives a perspective: it is a bar chart showing consumption of the materials used in the greatest FIGURE 2.1   The annual world production […]