EcoProIT
Encyclopedia
EcoProIT is a project initiated at Chalmers University of Technology
Chalmers University of Technology
Chalmers University of Technology , is a Swedish university located in Gothenburg that focuses on research and education in technology, natural science and architecture.-History:...

 at the department of Product and Production Development. It was set up in the context of ecological footprint
Ecological footprint
The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to...

 analyses, which are becoming more important in terms of marketing and legislation. A published report by MIT in 2011 showed companies thought that environmental sustainable strategy is, or will be, vital to be competitive.. The report included many sectors, e.g. covering medicals, automobiles and consumer products. EcoProIT will design a tool for industrial producers to mark their product with an environmental footprint using simulation tools. The tool will simulate the production and analyze the product's environmental footprint in a standardized way. It will also be possible yo use the tool for benchmarking between different sites. The aim for the tool puts high requierments on standardized methods and data management.

Vision - Tool usage

The vision of the usage of EcoProIT is important. Company A, who is a big and important stakeholder, is the main user of the tool in Figure 1. They require their close supplier partner to use the same tool. Company A and supplier A and B then set up an internal connection of their tools. The connection makes the input information for Company A up to date for every use. Company A also sets up a connection to their close partners that buy or distribute Company A’s products. It will then be possible to give a good estimation of the impact total specific distribution chain that will be up to data. The information can be used to inform the end users about total costs for the production data. The up to up to date chain gives a possibility to show the consumers that the company makes progress in lowering the environmental impact. Every improvement is delivered directly to the customers, and the new marketing possibility show what the production department is doing for the environment.

All information that is produced by the tool should be able to be uploaded to the central EcoProIT Database that stores it in a standardized way to be able to be used by other companies. The tool is also connected to other LCA databases to be able to use as input for the raw materials used in the production. Figure 1 shows a schematic view on how the system could be connected.

Environmental Activity-Based Costing

As an approach to calculation of the impact, activity-based costing
Activity-based costing
Activity-based costing is a special costing model that identifies activities in an organization and assigns the cost of each activity with resources to all products and services according to the actual consumption by each...

 will be used for calculations of environmental costs. Instead of using money as the cost, CO2 is used, for example. That is, given that the production process emits CO2, the cost for the product to be processed is taken to be the amount of time for it is processed multiplied by the emitted CO2 per unit time.

Sponsors

The main sponsor for the project is ProViking accompanied by a few big industrial partners.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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