Students from Professor Tim McAloone’s courses often take their business ideas to innovation competitions. Here Natasha Fiig and Kathrine Hagen have just won
the 1st prize in the Green Challenge in the category Bachelor final project for their project “Roof Tiles from Thin Plastic Waste in India”. MP Mogens Lykketoft is
presenting the award of DKK 30,000. Photo: Mikal Schlosser
students can focus on exactly the point or the issue that one wants
them to understand, and for this reason I often begin by bringing many
everyday products as examples, like tuna cans, milk cartons, children’s
shoes or bicycle lights.”
The students are then asked to consider design and environmental
issues related to the different products that I present to them. Slowly
but surely – as the students’ understanding at the theory develops, the
case examples get more complex too.
“All our courses are about designing better and more environmentally
considerate products and systems, while also considering economical
and business aspects,” he continues. “In the design phase, engineers
should consider all life phases of a product: Raw materials, production,
transport, use and finally end-of-use. We train the students to think
of all the possibilities and necessary considerations in every single
life cycle phase. The basic idea is to make them think holistically and
methodically at first, and then we can raise the level of difficulty when
they grasp the basics.”
In the Master’s course “Development and operation of product/servicesystems”,
Tim McAloone frequently spends the first day on letting his
students produce orange juice by different means. In the experiment,
the students are required to make juice using an electrical juicer or a
hand-powered juicer, after being asked to consider which method is
the most environmentally sound. “They all start by saying that the
hand-powered juicers are the most environmentally beneficial. Then
I give them 4 oranges each and 1 minute to produce as much juice as
possible. The electrical juicer always produces the largest amount of
juice. Afterwards, we discuss the exercise and reach the conclusion
that a small portion of electricity for an electric juicer might just be
worth saving the last drops of juice from an orange that has travelled
thousands of kilometres in a truck to reach Denmark! This leads us to
assessing the total costs and environmental loads of producing the
juice, including the transport of oranges from Spain to Denmark. We
can calculate how many megajoules the transportation takes, compared
to the few megajoules it takes to produce considerably more juice by
using the electrical juicer.”
Is juice produced with a hand-powered juicer more environmental friendly
than juice produced with an electrical juicer? The juice experiment is part
of Tim McAloone’s course “Development and operation of product/servicesystems”.
Photo: Colourbox
Do it and learn - Educating engineers at DTU Mechanical Engineering 23