It is said that 80% of the environmental impact of a product is determined at the design stage. Much of that impact is in materials selection and processing, so it is good practice for any design activity or material or process development to consider the impacts of raw materials sourcing, manufacture, the use phase and end of life. This page lists some resources available to help consider these impacts.

This page relates to the impact of products. For guidance on the impact of your organisation, go to Carbon Footprint. For relevant training provision, see Sustainability Training.

Resources

The Sustainability of Fibre-Reinforced Polymer Composites – A Good Practice Guide (free download via a short survey) is a comprehensive guide to support composites businesses to take practical steps quickly on the road towards true long-term sustainability.

Chapters:

  • Introduction to sustainability
  • Design for circularity
  • Life Cycle Assessment – Understanding impact
  • Using recycled materials
  • Using bio-based materials
  • Resource efficiency and processing
  • Targets, offsets, reporting and ESG
  • End-of-life and recycling
  • Policy and legislation
  • Next steps and future developments
  • Appendices include relevant standards, a Design for Sustainability methodology, and a list of LCA software packages

Other useful resources include:

  • Eco Impact Calculator, EuCIA 
    Simplified LCA tool for calculating the environmental impact of composite products from cradle-to-gate: from the raw materials up to the point-of-sale. Users can calculate, save and export the environmental impacts of composite products and components. An introduction to the calculator can be found at Eco Impact Calculator for Beginners
  • Open LCA
    Open source and free software for sustainability and life cycle assessments
  • Granta Selector, Ansys
    Granta Selector is a materials selection tool to find materials that minimise environmental impact while meeting cost and performance objectives. It includes:

    • Eco Audit Tool: Built in simplified LCA toolEnvironmental property data for 1000s of materials (CO2, embodied energy, water, recycled content in current supply, recycling energy, etc). An Eco add-on provides more data from ecoinvent.
    • Risk factors: Geopolitical, sourcing, abundance, conflict, restricted substances (REACH, SIN). Critical mineral content
  • Five Steps to Eco Design, Ansys Granta
    A short booklet providing advice on how you can tackle environmental issues within product design in an integrated and cost-effective manner.
  • Circular Design Tools and Resources, Ellen MacArthur Foundation
    A  selection of curated resources including links to online learning courses, conversations with experts, workshops and methods, as well as online spaces where you can connect with other circular designers.
  • Circular Composites: A Design Guide for Products Containing Composite Materials in a Circular Economy, TU Delft
    This guide focuses on developing new product concepts for a circular economy, exploring the product value chain, with a circular product design framework which can be used to detail circular strategies and identify relevant design aspects. Developed in Horizon 2020 project, Ecobulk.
  • Towards Design-for-Recyclability and Sustainable Manufacturing, MSC Software/Hexagon
    Using computer-aided engineering (CAE) and design simulation to drive sustainable engineering solutions
  • 12 Principles of Green Chemistry, ACS
    Developed by Paul Anastas and John Warner in 1998, the principles outline an early conception of what would make a greener chemical, process, or product. A good checklist if you are developing bio-based materials chemistry.

If you have other resources to add to this page, please contact us. Composites UK cannot validate and is not responsible for the content of resources produced by others.