News flash! Oil supply problems solved, four new oil reserves each the size of Saudi Arabia have been found under the North Pole.

Sorry it’s not true! But that’s how much oil we’d need to match our current demand with no growth during the next 30 years. In other words, according to Chevron, we’d need to find the same quantity of oil that we’ve already used during the last 125 years, i.e. 1 trillion barrels!

The Peak Oil debate really interests me. I’m not a geologist, and I know that we keep finding new oil reserves, but it’s becoming clear from expert reports that reserves are running out of that black gold we’re so dependent on, and no matter what some people say (usually politicians or oil producers) we will not be able to meet future demand. With 40% of worldwide traded energy and 90% of transport fuel being oil, what’s the solution?

But that’s not all, even before we run out of oil the car manufacturers have got to respond to very stringent emission regulations (EURO 6 for 2014, etc.) and more importantly have to reduce green house gases like CO² (95g/km by 2020 – today we’re at 160g/km).

It really is “make or break” time for the automotive industry…very exciting and all in my generation!!

So what are the options for automotive engineers? Well, there’s: increasing the vehicle’s energy efficiency to reduce fuel consumption, use fuels which emit less CO², drive electric, etc. Let’s examine…

Energy Efficiency
Improving the energy efficiency of today’s piston engines from a lowly 25% is top priority. Fortunately there are many ways to do this: advanced combustion (HCCI & CAI), reduce friction, hybrid drives to recover energy, etc. Many believe that mild hybrid gasoline engines with turbo charged direct injection will be the norm for 2020. Not easy but there’s great engineering talent out there…

Fuels which emit less CO²
Now here’s where is starts getting all messy and political…

• Bio-fuels? Some countries are investing heavily in producing bio-fuels, but by covering ALL of Europe’s agricultural land only 20% of our current needs in fuel would be covered by bio-fuels! Maybe super fast growing algae will save the day?

• Hydrogen? Seems like the holy grail, but running cars on hydrogen in a large Euro country (i.e. UK or France) would need: 70 extra nuclear power stations per country (today France has “only” 19), or solar panels covering 8,000km² (nearly the whole Parisian region), or a wind farm covering 24,000km² (nearly all of Belgium)! For the fuel cells themselves, I’m sure that we can find a viable solution to replace the rare and expensive platinum catalysts. The real issue is the hydrogen itself. Would you like to sit on a gas cylinder pressurised to 700bar or cooled to -253°C?

But what about the Electric Vehicle?

Now this looks interesting…the electric motor itself is easily a match for pistons engines in terms of acceleration and from “well to wheel” the EV is already 3 times more energy efficient than fuel cell cars and emits 25% less CO² than the best hydrocarbon burning vehicle. If only we could find a breakthrough in storing energy so that we can drive more than 100km and charge up quickly. But we’d still need about 24 extra nuclear power station to charge the batteries!!! Btw, for the batteries there isn’t enough lithium in the world to replace today’s car population.

I really think that the plug-in electric vehicle is the solution, but we’ll also have to radically change our habits and the transport infrastructure. Less travelling and more video conferencing (this will be a huge business in the future I’m sure), only small journeys in personal vehicles, long distance will be by public transport by converting the spider’s web of motorways we have today into platforms for intelligent trains carrying cars with wagons that can break off at intersections…woo I’ve been reading too much Jules Verne!!!

Anyway, lots of critical decisions will have to be made in product development, but maybe the biggest challenge for the automotive industry is to transform their organisations so that they can take these challenges with their suppliers…

Jonathan

References: David Strahan on Peak Oil, Bio-Fuels & Hydrogen, Véhicule 2030 by Jean Syrota (document in French) on Fuel Cell Cars vs. Electric Cars

We’re nearing the end of the “What is Green PLM” series, so it’s only appropriate that we talk about a later stage in PLM, packaging. You can argue that packaging should be considered, designed and planned for as part of the PLM process.

The Inside

There are so many ways to gage product sustainability and therefore numerous potential criteria to chose from for creating ecolabels on packaging. Yet this is a largely underdeveloped practice. For now.

Companies know that consumers tend to make emotional purchasing decisions, and sustainability is growing as a purchase trigger. People feel good making ethical purchase decisions. This coupled with the burgeoning environmental and sustainability compliance regulations make for a given: more and more companies will start to incorporate ecolabeling to their packaging so that consumers can easily identify and purchase sustainable products.

One of the ecolabel debates is should we, and how would we, indicate carbon criteria into product labeling. Not too long ago I read an interview conducted by GreenPower Conferences with Benjamin Casper, head of the European Commission’s EU Ecolabel team. When asked if the EU has plans to include specific amounts of carbon in its ecolabel, Benjamin responded:

We are looking into the possibility of more systematically introducing carbon related criteria into the Ecolabel, so that products bearing the label would have been compared to others in relation to carbon impact in the most significant areas of the products lifecycle, however this would not lead to details on specific figures on carbon being placed on products because making the calculations to provide accurate figures is proving almost impossibly complicated. Fundamentally we plan to stick with the rule that if you see the Ecolabel logo on a product, you can trust it to be one of the better products on the market in terms of environmental performance.

The Outside

To be consistent, companies must concern themselves with ensuring their products’ packaging is also sustainable. Was it designed to optimize materials? Which materials were used—ones that have been recycled and can go for another recycling spin? For logistics and transport, what about volume and weight? But there’s another side to this: will the ecopackaging and the ecolabel stand out on the shelf and attract shoppers to pick up the, let’s say ‘cookie box,’ consider a purchase, and then buy?

Even as consumers’ tastes change, a cookie box will still be one of many on a store shelf. It will always be in competition with dozens of others. The old-timey way to discern the best packaging was in focus groups. Gather a group of folks into an office or privatized store and get their feedback before finalizing packaging design. But is THIS sustainable? How many focus group sessions do you have to conduct, and in how many markets, before you can reach a final conclusion? And how many airplane flights (think carbon emissions) will it take?

There is another way. Virtual focus groups.

What if you can repurpose the 3D digital representation of your product by putting it into play in a virtual reality environment, and then invite consumers to test various ecopackaging scenarios in the comfort of their own homes, workplaces, and at their convenience? Imagine how much more feedback you can obtain, and at such a low impact!

There are lots of possibilities out there, and groups like ThinkBalm have developed entire communities to explore innovations with virtual worlds. They even have their meetings in places like Second Life. Through a joint venture called 3Dswym (swym = see what you mean), Dassault Systèmes and Publicis are leveraging the concept of virtual worlds to provide companies with software tools and services to conduct virtual focus groups.

I asked my colleague and one of the 3Dswym founders, Philippe Loeb, if he thinks companies are ready for virtual focus groups. Philippe said:

Virtual focus groups are emerging at a very particular time. Our clients are in indeed in front of a triple challenge: First, they need to continue to innovate for and also with consumers to match their rapidly changing expectations, like eco-packaging. In addition, many of them are in a position where they cannot afford multiple market failures. More than ever, they need to validate products’ potential by multiplying tests with consumers. Finally, they must at the same time control cost and the impact of overall product development, including testing and iteration loops. That’s why they see a growing interest in Virtual Focus groups. But for the time being, most of them still see it as a complement to traditional market research techniques.

There are some virtual packaging demos on the 3Dswym site that you can check out to get a feel.

Now that your minds are wrapped around ecopacaking and ecolabeling, I’d like to point out that the next post will be the last in our “What is Green PLM” series. I’m very pleased to introduce you to Jonathan Dutton, a former engine designer and now an automotive strategy guy for Dassault Systèmes. He’s going to wrap up our series with a post about sustainable transport. I think you’ll see the eco-warrior side of Mr. Dutton shine through; he’s passionate about his topic.

Best,

Kate

P.S. If you want to play an online teaser/game about sustainable marketing/packaging through a virtual shopping experience, go this CSR Europe page. In addition to the game, you’ll also find a free downloadable sustainable marketing guide. Both were developed in partnership with CSR Europe, BT, Dassault Systèmes, Danone, Sony and others.

A few weeks ago the European Union voted to phase out incandescent light bulbs entirely by 2012. The United States, Australia and Cuba are launching similar plans. If your household is anything like mine, you’ve already begun implementing a personal incandescent bulb phase-out plan, replacing your ‘last century lights’ with LED and other alternatives, in addition to, of course, doing what your mother always harped on during your childhood: “Turn off the lights!”

If you’re wondering what impact the new EU regulation will make, check out the energy-savings examples communicated in the Europa press release:

By enforcing the regulation of switching to energy saving bulbs, EU citizens will save close to 40 TWh (roughly the electricity consumption of Romania, or of 11 million European households, or the equivalent of the yearly output of 10 power stations of 500 megawatts) and will lead to a reduction of about 15 million tons of CO2 emission per year.

These figures demonstrate how the accumulation of people like you and me buying and using energy-efficient product innovations really can make a difference (i.e. new household lamp designs incorporating LED bulbs, like my nifty IKEA reading lamp—while the technology isn’t new, its inclusion into mainstream products is). Green PLM also plays a part.

In my last post of this series we looked at how companies are optimizing material usage in product design for a lighter environmental footprint. This in turn is linked to energy usage, because the lighter your car, the less fuel it consumes. But like our lights, products must also incorporate technologies to lighten their impact on the environment.

Now PLM doesn’t make technological innovations, people do. And sometimes we already have the right technologies but, for many different reasons, it’s difficult to get them executive-approved, produced and on the market. Take powertrains for example. Between automotive OEMs and their suppliers, the technology to increase fuel efficiency already exists. But because this knowledge is fragmented among different stakeholders dispersed around the globe and resides in various software systems, it’s quite difficult to get a holistic view of how this technology would impact pre-existing manufacturing infrastructures and other connected elements. So it’s tough to understand the full impact of switching to a different powertrain, and therefore tough to plan for this change. PLM 2.0 platforms like Dassault Systèmes’ V6 provide the digital environment to accomplish this.

What about when we haven’t yet nailed down the technology and are in the figuring-out phase? Well, why not use scientific simulation earlier in the design process? “Oh, ‘super idea’ X doesn’t get the type of results we wanted! Next!” You don’t have to waste downstream energy and time if you scientifically validate concepts early in the virtual design stage.

And when you’re working within a collaborative PLM 2.0 platform, you’re tapping into more collective brain power. Like I blogged in Design=Emotion=Day 2@ECF, “Creativity is individual, but innovation is collaborative.” It’s not some mad-scientist alone in his laboratory that’s going to help us make a difference. Together we’ll come up with solutions that we cannot dream up alone. Some people call this crowdsourcing. I call it working smart.

Do these things make PLM green? I’m not sure if this matters, because what counts are sustainable products and living. My take-away point is that PLM solutions can help companies boost innovation and develop, simulate, optimize and produce products that consume less energy.

Zooming out, I like to believe that we’re at the dawn of an energy-efficient era. I think that beyond our lights and cars, all of our everyday-living, energy-consuming products will get ‘retechnologicalized’ (if I may invent a word). What other examples can you think of? Solar-powered cell phones come to mind . . .

As an aside, I thought it’d be fun to share a product designed to help us be more mindful of our energy consumption. Check out Wattson

Best,

Kate

P.S. If you’re new to our Green PLM series, you may want to check out earlier posts:

• What is Green PLM?
• Do You Comply?
• Materials Optimization Cuisine