Sustainable from the start
In Corning Optical Communications, the Design for Sustainability program looks at a product’s entire life cycle.
How do you make a product more sustainable?
The answer isn’t straightforward. But in Corning Optical Communications (COC) employees are creating a framework that makes the answer to the question a little clearer. This is especially important as customers like data center operators look to reduce their overall carbon footprint.
“There isn’t one solution to change all our products,” says Valeria Nunez Alfaro, Sustainability Project Lead. “However, we can have a set of guidelines that give us a roadmap of how to do better.”
What Valeria’s describing is called Design for Sustainability, a methodology for product innovation that starts in the design phase.
Nearly 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined during its design, according to the International Institute of Sustainable Development.
“After a product is in production, you can certainly go back and decrease energy in manufacturing, redesign and reduce the amount of materials or reduce packaging, but it’s much easier to design for sustainability than attempt to achieve it later,” says Aislin Sullivan, Program Director, Sustainability, COC.
So, back to the original question: How do you make something more sustainable?
“You can rethink the amount of raw material and where the materials are sourced," says Nunez Alfaro, giving a few examples.
The Design for Sustainability team created Eco Design Guidelines for COC’s designers to reference in their product-development brainstorms.
“You can also think about the carbon emitted during the product’s manufacture and how to decrease it,” Nunez Alfaro says. “And there are other options: You can lower transportation distances or make the product easier for a customer to recycle.”
For example, the eco-design guidelines ask designers to scrutinize a product’s ease of disassembly in the future. Products like Corning® Evolv® Openable Terminal are designed so customers can more easily separate the product’s components for correct separation of waste, including recycling.
Corning’s SMF-28® Contour optical fiber is another example. Its reduced diameter with bend resilience is enabling the development of smaller, fiber-dense cables like MiniXtend® Ribbon Cable-200 Flow. Corning designers reduced the amount of material needed, reducing both cost and embodied carbon, while optimizing space efficiency for installers.
Left: 288F SST-UltraRibbon™ Cable (250 µm flat ribbon) vs. Right: 288F MiniXtend® Ribbon Cable-200 Flow. Due to a decrease in material (compare right to left), Corning’s MiniXtend® Ribbon Cable-200 Flow has a 60% lower carbon footprint, according to a third-party-reviewed life cycle assessment.
The extra step in the innovation process is worth it, says KC Simonson, Technology Program Manager and leader of this initiative. Simonson trains designers in Eco Design Guidelines and other tools as they work on Corning’s fiber connectivity solutions.
“We’ve really embedded sustainability into our innovation process, so it’s just a part of what we do and guides the decisions that we make,” Simonson says. “It is a culture shift we’re working on, but we have the smart people to do this work and the tools to equip them.”
So why do all this? For the environment, yes, but there’s a business need to meet as well.
Data center operators and telecommunication customers are placing greater demands on suppliers to address sustainability, both to meet regulations and to address stakeholder pressure. Corning’s adaptability and scientific capability can meet these demands and serve customers in the way they need, says Robert Elkins, Vice President of Technology, Optical Connectivity Solutions, Corning.
The COC Design for Sustainability team connects on their Eco Design Guidelines
“Our Design for Sustainability approach gives equal consideration to the environmental impact of our products along with all of the other challenging design requirements,” Elkins says. “As we seek novel solutions to satisfy all requirements, our designs become more efficient, while reducing the impact to our environment. Who would not want this result?”
An increasing number of customers are asking for product carbon footprint disclosures like life cycle assessments (LCAs). LCAs predict the environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life cycle, from conception to landfill or reuse.
Designing products with sustainability in mind reduces carbon footprint from the start, something that both Corning and our customers can benefit from.
“It's not only the right thing to do – it's the smart thing to do,” Sullivan says. “You’re lowering carbon intensity throughout the supply chain, which is even more important as data center operators accelerate their deployment of new, fiber-dense solutions to meet the scale and density demands of Generative AI.”
Each decision that happens in a product’s design has an impact later in its life.
“With Corning’s Design for Sustainability, we’re trying to reduce our impact and be really meticulous in these decisions,” Nunez Alfaro says. “For our own sustainability goals and for our customers’.”
The Design for the Sustainability team includes (from left to right) Marzanna Bucholc, Alicja Okulicz-Walenia, Khalid Amao, Valeria Nunez Alfaro, KC Simonson, and Hillary Junglas, not pictured: Matthew Srygler and Margarita Guillen