Introduction
In a truly product-focused environment, companies take proactive steps to decarbonize their operations and supply chains, addressing climate change with precision and urgency. Leveraging machine learning, data science, and sustainability expertise, they make informed decisions to effectively reduce emissions. Achieving net-zero emissions requires a commitment to shared accountability across the company and its supply chain. Prioritizing the use of sustainable materials, enhancing recyclability, ensuring durability, and promoting accessibility are key drivers of this progress.
As product designers, exploring the intersection of business and climate action offers a transformative opportunity to align design principles with the urgent needs of our planet. However, to truly leverage this intersection, it’s essential first to understand and define the key concepts driving it: Sustainability, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), climate change, and climate action. Each of these terms brings unique challenges and opportunities for innovation in product design. By integrating these concepts into the design process, product designers can unlock new opportunities to drive business growth while addressing global challenges.
The environmental impact of air conditioners (ACs) encompasses emissions from both product usage and manufacturing stages. At the usage stage, emissions arise from refrigerant leaks, energy demand, and contributions to the urban heat island effect. Refrigerants, historically associated with high Global Warming Potential (GWP), have been major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. In response, the industry is transitioning to innovative refrigerants with significantly lower GWP values and adopting natural alternatives wherever practical. These efforts reflect a strong commitment to global environmental goals and sustainability. Energy demand during AC usage is another major contributor to environmental impact. Enhanced energy efficiency standards regulated by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) help reduce energy consumption and related emissions. Innovations such as demand response systems optimize energy use by dynamically adjusting to grid conditions, further minimizing environmental strain.
Room ACs also exacerbate the urban heat island effect by discharging waste heat. This challenge is being addressed through integrated district cooling systems, which provide centralized cooling solutions, and other innovative approaches to manage and reduce heat emissions.
2. Opportunities
The air conditioning (AC) sector holds significant opportunities to contribute to global net-zero goals. As a sector traditionally associated with high energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, air conditioning can play a pivotal role in decarbonization through innovative technologies, sustainable practices, and systemic changes. Throughout a product’s lifecycle, from sourcing and manufacturing to use and disposal, product design can minimize its environmental impact. We can achieve this by:
- Design for Sustainability
(a) Types of refrigerant usage
- Use natural refrigerants like R-290 (propane), R-717 (ammonia) and R-744 (CO2) where possible.
- Reduce usage of R-404A, R-407C (from the year 2028) and R-410A as the alternatives get developed;
- But there is a limitation of using R290, because of higher flammability,
- Need of special training of technician for handling the R290.
(a) Carbon Credit Trading Scheme
A market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the country’s climate goals. The scheme is being implemented in phases and is expected to be fully operational in 2025-26.
(b) Circular Economy
A circular economy should be promoted. Unlike the linear economy, which extracts, uses, and then discards resources, the circular economy uses, recovers, and regenerates resources in a closed loop. Designing products that are easy to fix, refurbish, and recycle can play a big role in facilitating the circular economy.
Reduce: Create modular designs that are easy to repair, ensuring products are built to last and highly durable.
Recycle: Develop products using readily recyclable materials to facilitate efficient recycling processes.
Reuse: Design products with refurbishment in mind, enabling them to be restored to a like-new condition and reused.
Recover: Utilize any remaining plastic waste that cannot be reduced, reused, or recycled by converting it into energy or other valuable resources through recovery processes.
Case Study: Recycled Plastic
The recycling of plastic is not as hard as manufacturing new plastic products. Nonetheless, it involves rigorous procedures and attention to detail. The processes may take.
Policy Directive: The Indian government has introduced a circular economy draft policy that mandates manufacturers to incorporate at least 20% recycled materials in their product parts. This initiative aims to promote resource efficiency, reduce dependency on virgin materials, and minimize waste generation. By enforcing such guidelines, the policy encourages industries to adopt sustainable practices, enhance material recovery, and support India’s transition towards a circular economy.
3. Renewable Energy
A product’s environmental impact can be reduced by incorporating renewable energy into its design. Sustainable energy sources can be integrated into products in several ways:
(a) Solar Cells:
- Can be incorporated in the product
- Can be incorporated in the packaging of the product.
(b) Wind Turbines:
Designing products that incorporate wind turbines can generate electricity from wind energy. The technology can be used for products such as street lights, building ventilation systems, and even small-scale home wind turbines.
4. Sustainable Behaviour
Product design should encourage sustainable behaviour. The design of products can make it easy for users to reduce their water and energy consumption, which can have a positive impact on the environment.
(a) Feedback Mechanisms:
Using Feedback Mechanisms such as digital displays, product designers can provide users with real-time information about their water and energy consumption. In this way, users can make more informed decisions about their usage and reduce their overall energy consumption Water and energy consumption can also be automatically adjusted based on user behaviour or external factors, such as weather, by incorporating smart technology into product designs.
(c) Easy to use:
Creating easy-to-use products can help users reduce water and energy consumption. By adding flow restrictors to faucets and shower heads, for instance, you can reduce water consumption.
5. Accessibility
For product functions that are designed keeping in my ESG and Climate actions, to be effective, these functions have to be accessible and easy to use.
(a) Universal Design:
The concept of universal design refers to the principles of creating products that are simple to use and accessible to people of all abilities and ages. Products that are designed with large buttons, and intuitive controls, making it easier for them to navigate the product.
(b) Making Products Affordable:
The goal here is to design products that are affordable.
(c) Climate Resilient Products:
The design of climate-resilient products also enables product designers to design products that are capable of withstanding extreme weather / & real-world scenarios.
(d ) Products that raise awareness:
It is also possible for product designers to create products that educate and raise awareness about sustainability, environmental issues, climate change, and climate action by integrating these features into the designs, making it easier for people to understand and act on these issues.
(e) Designing for a larger audience:
It is also critical for product designers to consider inclusivity when designing products. This is to ensure that the products are accessible to people with different cultures, languages, and abilities, as well as people with different abilities and backgrounds.
6. Sustainable Sourcing
Designing products to align with sustainability goals is important, but achieving meaningful climate action requires a collective effort across sourcing, supply chain, and distribution.
These are the 7 pillars to sustainable sourcing:
- Long-term, strategic sourcing lens
Sustainable sourcing requires a long-term perspective, focusing on enterprise value, resource availability, and sustainability while addressing critical risks such as biodiversity loss and climate change. - Comprehensive, thoughtful sourcing criteria
Sustainable sourcing should consider financial sourcing requirements like cost, quality, and risk alongside ESG factors like ethics, human rights, equity, and environmental impacts. - Systematic, transparent supplier evaluation, onboarding, and management
Establish consistent and well-documented guidelines, processes, policies, and systems for monitoring and approving purchasing requests, managing vendors, sourcing negotiations, invoicing and payment, data and record-keeping, inventory management, and other strategic purchasing considerations. - Efficient Spend
Sustainable sourcing should aim to be a source of cost savings and positive ROI by reducing input costs, usage, and/or promoting circular reuse. - Optimized inventory and logistics
Better-optimized logistics and inventory aren’t just better for business, it’s often more sustainable. Less transportation mileage, less raw material consumption, lower energy use, and reduced waste are all hallmarks of sustainable sourcing and operations - Supplier engagement
Building strong relationships with high-quality suppliers is essential to your organization’s success, particularly when you need to collaborate with those suppliers on sustainable sourcing performance, transparency, and traceability
Unified Data
Accurate data is essential for enhancing supply chain sustainability, from evaluating supplier risks to analyzing the environmental and social impacts at the product level.
Sr General Manager
Technology & Innovation Centre
Voltas Limited