Software integration eases green product design

Software developers Sustainable Minds and Autodesk have created a close integration that marries Sustainable Mind's Web-based lifecycle assessment tool more closely with the Autodesk Inventor 3-D design application.

The primary benefit of the integration: Designers at manufacturing companies can assess the impact of a proposed product design BEFORE it even gets to the prototyping phase by bouncing information about selected components against the Sustainable Minds Release 1.0 ecodesign information service.

Here are specific details about the integration:

• Materials names in Inventor have been mapped to the Okala Impact Factor database
• There is now consistency between the way that the Inventor and Sustainable Mins applications handle bill of materials
• The software now supports automatic mass unit conversion