9319731 Lave Business is under increasing pressure to make each aspect of their activities, products and packaging "environmentally friendly." Unfortunately, no one is clear about what this goal means operationally. We propose research to enhance the ability of corporations to understand recycling, improve their product and process design for the environment, and measure the improvements resulting from our collaboration. Our work consists of six tasks: 1. Improve measures of the environmental consequences of alternative products or designs. Without quantitative measures, goals are vague and management performance cannot be assessed. 2. Estimate and implement our measures for a range of IBM printers. We will collaborate with IBM to meet the corporate goal of increased environmental friendliness through developing and implement our measures and approach. 3. Implement a system that informs the designers at IBM of the environmental implications of alternative designs, materials, choices, and other design issues. We will explore both intrusive and non-intrusive systems. 4. Examine the ways in which the tools can be designed into a company's organizational structure. We seek ways to have companies meet environmental goals routinely and inexpensively without excess time of top executives or decreased produce quality. 5. Investigate organizational learning by examining the extent to which our tools affect product design, particularly as measured by our indices, and how the use of these tools disseminate through the organization and become more valuable to designers over time. We will explore how to increase productivity while enhancing environmental friendliness. 6. Transfer our results and indices to a second company making a quite different product. The Ford Motor Company will work with us in transferring the research results from IBM to quite a different setting.***
