IDC Launches Lifecycle Assessment Software for Sustainable Product Design
Leading product design agency, Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC), is delighted to announce the launch of the LCA Calculator, a radical new software package for lifecycle analysis by product developers. It has been eagerly awaited since IDC's trial version three years ago. A customised version of the system has already been ordered by some of Britain's largest manufacturing companies.
The LCA Calculator is a quick and intuitive way for designers and engineers to understand, analyse and compare environmental impacts of products and particular design decisions. It analyses the effects that a product or service has on the environment over the entire period of its life - from the extraction and processing of raw materials from which it is made - through to the manufacturing, packaging and marketing processes, and the use, re-use and maintenance of the product, and on to its eventual recycling or disposal as waste at the end of its useful life.
Traditional lifecycle assessment programmes involve large amounts of research, require specialist knowledge and take a considerable amount of time looking into all aspects of the product. In practice, therefore, these only tend to be carried out once all aspects of the products are defined, by which time it is generally too late to make changes. In contrast, IDC's LCA Calculator takes only a few minutes to obtain the same information, which means designs can be adjusted to answer 'what if' questions until they achieve the optimum design.Stephen Knowles, Managing Director of IDC, explains, "As a design consultancy, our job is to help companies develop better products. We were aware that many companies don't know where to start when it comes to assessing environmental impact. They know that the move towards 'greener' product design is inevitable and want to be part of it, but until now there has not been a simple tool to assess the environmental impact of a product. The LCA Calculator will enable companies to understand the environmental impact of design decisions and is a first step towards putting sustainable design at the heart of the development process."
The LCA Calculator is available in three versions: Pro, Business and Corporate Bespoke. The Pro version is suited to individual usage while the Business and Corporate version allows design teams to share and analyse data, as well as manage access and permissions for usage. Both packages are priced competitively, making sustainable design an affordable possibility. The software is extremely user-friendly and walks the user through the lifecycle assessment in a straightforward process, which provides high-accuracy results. Full details are available at: www.lcacalculator.com.
