Biogenic and Bioinspired Functional Materials for Sustainability

The creation, use and disposal of any engineering product carry with it an environmental burden. On the one hand, materials contribute much to the environmental impact of a product over its lifetime, on the other, materials offer considerable potential to minimize a product's environmental burden. The sustainable and circular economy, which we increasingly desire, requires the development, informed selection and application of new materials that—without compromising product quality—are lighter and less energy intensive, create less toxic by-products, enable a longer product life, are more easily recycled, and whenever possible, use non-critical, renewable or biogenic resources. Presented will be examples for the design and manufacture of biogenic and bioinspired functional materials and how these can be integrated into teaching strategies and tools in support of eco-design and eco-audits, which introduce students to a holistic approach to environmentally-conscious materials selection and its importance at the early stages of the design process. Illustrated will be, how through case studies on the environmentally-conscious redesign of an existing product, students learn to identify and focus on the life phase with the greatest environmental impact, how a trade-off analysis of energy cost of function versus pecuniary cost of function can guide decision making for a given set of design constraints, and whether, in fact, offering a service that would provide the same service unit of the existing product, but at a reduced footprint over the entire life cycle, might be the better solution. Finally, introduced will be the 'Discover Materials!' a “please touch” materials library and exhibition, which links physical materials and product examples, sustainable or not, with software- and web-based selection and information tools and the processes available to students in workshops on campus, in which students can turn materials into technical solutions to engineering problems, or art, or both.