Shifting priorities in product development

--Richard Mandel

In the scant moment of time that this magazine has existed, the very act of designing a product has undergone a profound change. Up until 20 years ago, concept went to hardcopy when a hand lifted a writing instrument to a surface. Additional copies were made, filed, passed about, annotated, spilled on, redrawn and, eventually, passed down to the shop. The age of CAD has replaced that glamour with a new one, in which files of components and design elements can be swiftly accessed for application to new products. More, it has enabled the development of international standardizations in product development and manufacturing processes that would have been utterly unwieldy and unmanageable in an earlier decade, but now abet the global market at a mouse-click.

The added benefit of all this is a renaissance in the process of product design -- not just in determining how a product is going to look, but actually invoking consideration of a product's life cycle. Auto manufacturers like Ford are taking a close look at what parts can be made from recyclable materials and what parts can be made from substances that would actually allow reuse of the component. Eastman Kodak's Funsaver cameras are now designed to be returned to the company from the film processor, where they are reloaded with fresh film, resealed, and sent back out to the stores (ironically, similar to the original Kodak camera cycle of 100 years ago). The result is not just a cost reduction in the manufacture of new components, but a reduction in the requirement for raw material and less stress on landfills.

A recent exemplar of this can be found in the Xerox Corporation, Rochester, NY. When developing the DC 265 family of mid-range digital copiers and printers, engineers decided to do a complete, ground-up rethink of the machine and the manufacturing process behind it. Following is an interview with Jack C. Azar, vice-president for Environment, Health and Safety at Xerox.

JA: In developing this product line, we set out to work with three principles: recyclability and reusability, with emphasis on the latter; minimization of any hazardous materials, and identification of any parts having hazardous materials that require special handling; and development of energy saving features further in the machine. We also were concerned with reducing chemical and physical emissions (like EMI) and noise, both in the production line and the machine itself.

DFX: Did the idea for a product first come up, and then a staffer suggested, "Hey we're at a crossroads here, let's re-examine our manufacturing process?" Or was the product the first out of a restructuring?

JA: Well, we set out on a broad recycling and reuse strategy, which we called our Waste-Free Product Strategy, back in 1991. Our organization then set out looking for new product teams that were interested in implementing the strategy. With old products, you see, there's only so much you can do with variants, in terms of changing their designs to make them more and more recyclable and reusable. Now we're working to get these principles and this approach inculcated straight across our whole time-to-market process, which is really our product development process. All of our products are, ultimately, going to be developed this way.

DFX: How much of a "design for environment" process depends on the engineer's raw brain power? Do you use any software for support?

JA: There's no unique software that we're using. We have developed our own guidelines and checklists. Ultimately, you need the right type of involvement from manufacturing engineers who know some environmental principles, and participation by the health and safety people, too. We haven't found a software package that comprises all of this just yet. There are mechanical engineering softwares developed for "design for disassembly," for example, or design for environment with respect to material usage. They're OK, at best, but they do not give us enough of the story -- how to disassemble in an environmentally-preferred fashion, and the valuations of what you can put in the design versus what you shouldn't put in the design. There's more to it than how to take a product apart.

DFX: In regard to a copy machine,would the chief environmental issues be the toner and the ozone output?

JA: Generally speaking, ozone emissions from copy machines are greatly reduced today from what they were 10, 12 years ago. But we're on a track to take it even further, so that it's not a consumer concern any longer. And besides ozone, there are other chemical emissions, like volatile organics and even airborne metallic particulates that have to be minimized, that we measure very carefully down to the parts per billion.

Now, let me tell you about toner. Toner itself is not hazardous, at least the ones we use, but it is a waste problem for the customer. So we are first trying to minimize the amount of waste toner the machine puts out. We are also starting to remanufacture the post-consumer toner. Once it goes through the xerographic process, its electrical properties have changed -- you can't just take it out, dump it in another bottle and reuse it again. It is returned to the manufacturing process of making new toner, mixed in with resin and carbon black and additives, then heated and extruded and distributed as "remanufactured," analogous to recycled printer paper. While this hasn't been applied to all of our toner lines, we are the first company to do this.

DFX: Does there exist a sort of "copy machine graveyard" where old copiers are broken down to the reusable component level?

JA: We've always had operations where machines are returned on trades or off lease, and we did some limited remanufacturing. But it was not a completely thought-out, design-intended process. Now we know, when we build these new machines, which parts have several "customer lives" in them -- that is, a machine may come back after a million-image average life, but since some parts are designed for many millions of imprints, then it becomes a simple matter of removing and reusing them, after they are tested to make certain they are still within spec. And that spec allows us to guarantee the performance of the remanufactured machine the same as the new machine.

DFX: Are the parts that don't go into remanufactured machines sent back to their manufacturers to be re-melted and applied into new castings?

JA: Our reuse and recycling loop actually involves the vendors who supply us with the parts, and they handle the repair and remanufacture of the parts themselves.

DFX: So a tear-down and re-use operation, such as you have now, succeeds because you can track component design electronically, applying that component into new designs as they arise.

JA: In fact, when you design base, or "platform," products that have many spin-offs, you can keep using the same parts if they come back with adequate usage left. But you have to do it with a design in mind.

We started out doing this with our print cartridges, the toner cartridges in the small machines. They had a short life, but some of the components were still good. The customers, particularly in Europe, started asking about what we were doing to recycle these.

The Europeans are trying to develop product take-back programs that involve, to some extent, the municipalities, the private companies and the public. So that with consumer products, if it's done on a large enough scale, it can pay off, not just in terms of the disassembly facilities, but in the transportation cost as well.

Speaking of transportation, many auto manufacturers in Europe have begun pilot programs for recycling cars. Several U.S. companies are starting to look into it, too. 75% of car parts are recycled now -- the remaining 25%, what's called "fluff," are things like rubber, plastic and glass that have to be separated from the product prior to recycling. But they're working on that, too.

For more information, Circle 579 - Xerox Corporation