💻 Electronics industry | Minimize your carbon footprint and cut costs
🍃 How to reduce your carbon footprint
Reducing carbon footprint in the electronics industry can be a daunting task, particularly for well-established manufacturers that are reluctant to divert from traditional methods. Across the world, government and consumer pressure are forcing manufacturers to take on greater responsibility in reducing their emissions.
As a result, many companies in the electronics industry need to implement more sustainable practices and focus on reducing emissions, including using renewable energy sources, implementing energy-efficient production processes, and designing devices that use less energy during operations. Using recycled materials and the development of circular business models that aim to reduce waste and extend the life of electronic products are highly relevant in this context.
Despite these drivers, some companies still seem hesitant to shift their manufacturing processes, citing concerns about initial costs, and emissions disclosures. However, many long-term opportunities exist for companies willing to make the switch. Implementing low-emission manufacturing processes or utilizing material recycling and recovery options can reduce energy consumption costs, waste treatment, and any excess operations. Additionally, as environmental legislation is likely to get stricter, prioritizing these practices will put the industry ahead of the curve and make any future changes easier to adopt.
Electronics manufacturing opportunities
Several opportunities exist for pursuing sustainable strategies, but perhaps the single most powerful one is embedding sustainability into product design, which determines an estimated 80 percent of the future carbon footprint. Designers, engineers, and purchasers are the best positioned to identify the factors that affect costs and emissions upfront as well as that these costs are passed along the entire value stream of a product and have an impact throughout its entire life cycle. Using analytics to examine the cost and environmental footprint of a product at each stage of the development process is by far the best solution. It provides much greater transparency, enables smarter trade-offs, and informs stronger CO2e emissions strategies.
Ready to measure your cost and carbon footprint and develop actionable reduction targets?
Our solution Teamcenter Product Cost Management, with its integrated approach, is your single access point for product cost and carbon emissions:
🍃 Link cost and CO2e emissions along the value chain
The Teamcenter Carbon Footprint Calculator as part of the Teamcenter Product Cost Management solution follows a bottom-up analysis workflow for CO2e emissions, where all relevant emission factors of the product along the value chain are summarized. The carbon footprint calculator considers all the processes from extracting raw or recycled materials and manufacturing of precursors through the production of the final product and when it leaves the company gate (cradle-to-gate). It provides a carbon footprint breakdown, along with cost analysis, revealing opportunities to reduce both carbon footprint and product costs along the value chain. Since the analysis is done at a granular level, companies can set eco-design strategies such as design for resource efficiency or design for recycling by using a systematic approach that integrates ecological aspects from the product planning, development, and design process through the entire product lifecycle.
🍃 Simulate options for reducing the product carbon footprint
Simulations can be conducted on material substitution, weight savings, higher material recycling ratios, manufacturing process optimization, etc., by using the integrated database with CO2e emission values for material data such as metals, polymers, composites, powder materials and the energy mix from various countries and regions.
🍃 Consider carbon taxation
Thinking more broadly, regulatory authorities also play a significant role in influencing the design for sustainability that companies adhere to. Because of this a relevant factor being considered for the cost calculation is carbon taxation, which is pushing companies to make the carbon footprint of their products transparent. Thus, the carbon footprint calculator can be used to factor in carbon taxation.
🍃 Follow international standards and rules
Product carbon footprints are calculated following general standards for products as stipulated in the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), European Standard (EN), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14067, as well as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Product Standard.
While reducing an entire industry’s carbon footprint can seem like a large undertaking, many incentives and opportunities now make the transition easier for companies.
Overall, an earlier transition will have more significant financial and environmental impacts.
Try Teamcenter Product Cost Management for Electronics
For those who want a hands-on experience, we have developed a Teamcenter Product Cost Management trial. There are no license costs associated with this offer, no installation is required, and the system will be available for 30 days.
Interested in learning more?
Leveraging technology, such as cloud-based collaboration tools, cost, sustainability, and supply chain management software, can help streamline and manage complexity in the design and product development processes, control costs, improve communication, and enable better coordination between teams. For more information have a look at our solutions for New Product Introduction (NPI) & Supplier Collaboration.
No matter how you choose to deploy Teamcenter,
you get the same proven solutions designed to help you innovate faster.
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