Green Design Institute

Team Challenge

This challenge uses an interactive online model to perform a life cycle analysis (LCA) on your product!  What is the environmental impact of your product or service throughout its lifespan anyways?  How do you account for the environmental impacts of producing  and transporting the raw materials that you need?  LCA is an important concept in putting together a great business plan!

Resources

Using the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute EIO-LCA model will help your team on its way to understanding the environmental impacts of producing goods or services. There is a tutorial if you don't feel like jumping in, but would rather learn to walk before you run.

Process

BASIC LEVEL Your challenge (should you choose to accept it) is to explore the input/output relationships of an industry and gather some model-produced data that you can use in a number of ways in your business plan! Choose an industry that you think may be related to your solution. Then use the Green Design Web site to explore. Be sure to record your key steps and document your results (grab your data and use it in your business plan narrative!)...you will be producing great data about your industry for your business plan!

1. The first step in using the EIO-LCA model is to select an industry sector to analyze. This means that you need to think about your product of interest as it fits within the overall industry structure.

2. Once you have selected a major industry group, the industry sectors within that group appear.

3. Once you have selected an industry sector, a description of the types of facilities included in that sector appears. This allows you to determine if the sector produces the output you want.

4. Then , you determine (or guess, or estimate, or experiment with) the level of economic activity for the desired sector, or how much output is required to be produced, or the demand for output.

5. Then you choose an "impact" category (this is your result of making all those decisions and letting the model compute the result!

GOING BEYOND Apply this kind of thinking to your whole solution and its supply chain.

GOING CRAZY Surprise us!

Result