Green Design

Environmental effects were ignored during the design stage for new products and processes in the past. Waste was common in material production, manufacturing, and distribution. Hazardous wastes were dumped in the most convenient fashion possible, ignoring possible environmental damage, and inefficient energy use resulted in high operating costs. It was realized in the 1970s that to achieve a real effect on reducing product- and process-related environmental impacts, environmental considerations should be built into product development at the earliest opportunity, and customers should be steered toward the greener options. Rapid industrialization, regulatory pressure, higher requirements from customers, open markets, increased demands to defend or expand market share and to create the ability to attract foreign investments, and an increase in competitiveness between companies locally and globally have paved a way for this paradigm shift in the design process.

Green design is intended to improve environmental quality through better design and management in the production and consumption activities of economic enterprises. This green approach involves the smart design of products, processes, systems, and organizations and evolves a particular framework for the implementation of relevant analysis, synthesis methods, and smart management strategies that effectively harness technology and ideas to avoid environmental problems before they arise.

[Page 203]Various aspects of green design involve improving energy efficiency, safeguarding water, managing waste, planning a sustainable site, and creating healthy indoor environments using environmentally preferable materials.

Three goals for green design in pursuit of a sustainable future are to reduce or minimize the use of nonrenewable resources, manage renewable resources to ensure sustainability, and reduce, with the ultimate goal of eliminating, toxic and harmful emissions to the environment.

The objective of green design is to pursue these goals in the most cost-effective fashion. To achieve this aim, we need to adopt the following green design principles: minimize or design away the extraneous, integrate design aspects for multiplicity of function, design for all aspects of climate at all levels, think about the unintended consequences of maintenance and renewal, select materials that use their base resource most efficiently, and design to use maximum local and regional resources.