The European Union is developing guidelines to ensure that product designers take the impact of their product into account in the design phase. The intent is to make almost all physical goods on the EU market more environmentally friendly throughout their entire lifecycle. This includes the ability to repair the product, the reuse of components and/or materials or lowering energy consumption. At Demcon we think this is important; we want to participate in this. We also want to respond to market and customer needs that arise in this area. This means that we will also be introducing Environmentally Conscious Design (ECD). Our goal is to determine per project and product type how we can reduce the overall footprint by making conscious design choices.
adjusting our ways of working.
In 2023, awareness of sustainable design (SD) within Demcon grew significantly, particularly within Life Sciences & Health. In many projects, more attention is paid to the impact of the project and the subject is more explicitly discussed with clients. We also achieved the following results in 2023:
our aims for 2024.
The intent is to further incorporate Sustainable Design into the Demcon way of working. To accomplish this we are going to integrate the ECD standards into our quality management system (QMS) on the basis of the ISO 14006. We intend to make Sustainable Design part of the existing Demcon development processes, so that engineers incorporate it into their way of working. We have already taken the first steps toward achieving this goal.
Our overall Sustainable Design targets for 2024 are as follows:
We intend to achieve these targets by initiating and implementing the following projects:
In 2022, an initial version of a sustainable design methodology was set up. Over the past two years, we have tested this methodology during several pilot projects. The methodology was optimized on the basis of these tests and then put into use. Naturally, we will be further optimizing and integrating this methodology.
To involve all engineers in the new sustainable design methodology, training courses together with the associated training materials were developed. Draft versions of the methodology are now available at three levels: basic, medium and expert. Initial training sessions have since been held and we will continue our efforts in 2024.
We will appoint several engineers as Sustainable Design Owners. They will be responsible for involving our engineering groups, integrating the sustainable design methodology into the engineers’ existing ways of working and making engineers aware of the importance of this.
Demcon is associated with the Saxion Life Science, Engineering and Design (LED) Academy Mechanical Engineering education program. On behalf of the business community, we provide input for the associated teaching program. When the evaluation of this education program recommended that the sustainability topic should have a greater future-oriented focus, we followed up on that. Since 2022, we are presenting a guest lecture twice a year on ’Sustainable Product Development’. This guest lecture is about looking for a balance between the technical solution, the product’s lifecycle and dealing responsibly with raw materials. We hereby provide a frame of reference that makes it possible to make different choices in this area.