Sustainable Minds Release 1.0: A Video Report

I’m half way into my 30-day trial period of Sustainable Minds, a Web-hosted lifecycle assessment software. With nothing to install, I used the browser-based software from the company to play out a hypothetical manufacturing scenario: I redesigned a toaster in my product line (from Food Happy Corp., my imaginary family-own business) to make it less detrimental to the environment. As it turned out, redesigning the product itseslf wasn’t enough. I had to rethink the product’s entire lifecycle, including how to deal with its disposal.

If you decide to do a similar exercise in Sustainable Minds, when creating your system bill of materials (SBOM), you might come across certain materials that don’t give you an option to specify “end of life” method. Terry Swack, CEO and cofounder of the company, explained, “While our database will be continuously evolving, the fact that there’s no end of life data for all the inputs is not so much a function of the database being [a work] in progress, but [a consequence of] the fact that [lifecycle] data doesn’t exist at all. We’re in the process of developing estimated data so there will be something that can be assigned [as numeric values],  and it will be labeled as such.”

For more watch the video below or read my previous report, “Sliding into Sustainable Mindset.”