Ink-Jet Research

Economic viability is at the heart of the MIT researchers' early efforts to change industry practices. Gutowski recently completed his first research project-studying ink-jet printers-with Brianne Metzger, SM '03, SM '03, a graduate of MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing program. As part of a 2002 summer internship with Hewlett-Packard, Metzger, with Gutowski as one of her advisors, designed software that calculates the percentage of recyclable material in ink-jet printers, so that manufacturers can conform to the new European Union recycling laws. The software asks the designers a series of 35 questions about the material composition of their products-for example, whether the plastics used are painted (painted plastics can be difficult or nearly impossible to recycle). Or it might ask about the size of the circuit board: under EU recycling requirements, the circuit board must be smaller than 10 centimeters squared. Anything larger must be pulled out of the computer. "This requires a disassembly step which is labor-intensive," Gutowski explains. "So one thing you might do in your design is have itty-bitty circuit boards or have one big one, but you've got to think about the accessibility of the circuit board." Gutowski and Metzger hope that this program will get designers thinking about these issues from the start.

And it's in the companies' best interest to stay in the European market for electronic goods, which was estimated to be around $50 billion in 2003. Gutowski's work with Hewlett-Packard is just the beginning of what he predicts will be a large-scale movement toward recycling considerations in product design before the European laws go into effect in 2006. "I want to give the proper feedback to companies, so they can improve their design," Gutowski says. "When we implement this, we put in place the right kind of cost incentives."

Field and Kirchain are looking more generally at economic models for industrial ecology. Since summer 2003 the two have visited some half-dozen recyclers on the East Coast to gather data-both past and present-on what sorts of electronic materials have been collected and what percentage of them are extracted and recycled. They then plug this data into economic models to try to determine whether recycling can be economically viable.

The researchers believe that recycling works best when it is a consequence of market demand for recycled products, rather than the result of regulation. The combination of product design and recycling technology that would encourage recycling is not always obvious, but any long-term solution will depend upon discovering and developing it.

Teaching a New Mindset

In the long run, the economic issues of recycling will become a big part of engineering education. MIT's engineering systems division is tackling them: instead of just looking at how products are used, it considers them from start to finish-and that includes recycling. Field and Kirchain, along with Joel Clark, ScD '72, SM '75 , teach this holistic perspective to their students in Industrial Ecology, a class that incorporates life-cycle analysis and introduces tools engineers can use to design for end-of-life recycling.

Gutowski is teaching a new course this year called Environmentally Benign Manufacturing. He and Field, Kirchain, and Clark confer on how to teach the course and how to tackle recurring issues. While Industrial Ecology might offer specific design tools, Gutowski's class also looks at long-term system engineering and even philosophical approaches to the environment and an engineer's responsibility to it.

"This is just the beginning," Gutowski says. "This whole area of industrial ecology started just a couple of years ago. We're trying to do the science to find out what's going on. Sometimes I think when I teach my students I'm talking to them more as citizens than engineers, because they have to be informed as citizens to solve the problem."

And as the mountains of outdated computers continue to grow, the need to responsibly recycle them will become even more urgent.