Green Product Design at AT&T

Most of the environmental impacts of a product are determined by the product designer who thus is a major determinent in AT&T's manufacture of "green" (i.e., environmentally responsible) products. We present and discuss in this paper some of the elements of "green design", an activity termed Design for Environment (DFE). Two types of activities are involved in DFE: generic activities (those that are reliable general guidelines for environmentally-preferable approaches, such as the minimization of energy use) and specific activities (those related to individual products, such as the choice of particular materials). A DFE evaluation methodology has been developed and applied to a broad selection of AT&T telecommunications products. These products generally rate reasonably highly from a DFE standpoint, but our assessments show a number of areas in which improvements can be made. These are implementable not only by physical designers, but also by manufacturing engineers and supply line managers.