Currently on ENGINEERING.com: The PLM Developers and the Path to Sustainable Design – a PTC Perspective

Meet PTC's head of sustainability DAVE DUNCAN in today's in-depth interview.
"Sustainable design" is not without good reason the mantra of the day in everything to do with product development and the product life cycle. Moreover, it is also the subject of intensive investments by the PLM developers, who quickly, in addition to what they already have, add modules and capabilities for things like life cycle analysis (LCA), databases for environmentally friendly material choices, regulation and standards adaptation and other, and the PLM developer who does not appoint a sustainability officer does not exist.
The climate problem is, in short, putting much of the order of things on its head. According to the UN's IPCC panel, human activity plays a triggering role in this, not least related to things like raw material extraction, energy production, transport, agriculture and general industrial production. At the same time, all these pieces are essential for human prosperity.
"How do you put together a sustainable equation out of this," I asked PTC's VP of sustainability, Dave Duncan.
"It is clear that the world's engineers and product developers play incredibly important roles on the way forward. As well as the digital tools needed to support the development of innovative and minimal environmental impact solutions,” he said and added: “Remember that eighty percent of a product's footprint is determined by the design. With innovative technology, well-thought-out processes, informed choices of raw materials and balanced extraction of fossil substances and metals, the world's engineers can make a lot happen. Of course, they cannot reverse the trend themselves, everyone has to help, but technological development has always been a fundamental part of human action. Part of the solution is to grab the right ends.”
Discussing sustainability you can of course take the really high level overarching sustainability principles approach, but, like Dave Duncan notes, development is just as much about the smaller steps; about how we think around innovations, how we set up manufacturing and other things, and how, for reasons of feasibility, we have to take it step by step and let the overall principles drill down to and guide how the work is carried out sustainably according to these principles in area by area.
In today's article I discuss with PTC's Dave Duncan the topic of sustainability related to among other things plastic handling, which is an extremely important issue on the road to a circular life cycle approach.
Click on the headline below, or the link, to read the full interview.