Conference Report - Shortcuts, bypasses, turns, forks mark the road to design for the environment

easy task. Indeed, the goal is often a moving target. It may be as simple as reduced environmental impact. It could be zero waste, the goal set by some forward-looking companies. Impacts are at best calculated since the actual effect of a product on the environment is not easily measurable. The 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment (ISEE, Danvers, MA, U.S.A., May 1113, 1999), the seventh such annual conference on reducing environmental impact, mixed case histories with cutting edge technology and new ideas and concepts to provide an excellent snapshot of progress and pot holes as the industry strives to-refine its assessment and design tools. Of the three concurrent tracks at the conference, DFE Implementation Strategies including management integration filled one. Product Take Back topics such as disassembly, demanufacturing, and remanufacturing dominated another. The third was comprised mostly of papers on End of Life CosVDesign Strategies and Recycling. Some three hundred professionals from the electronics industry, academia, and government met at the 1999 ISEE. The program was comprised of 63 papers, twenty by speakers outside the U.S.A. Three of the tutorial Workshops of the Conference reflected everyday problems: Theory and Application of Tools, Environmental Labeling and Supply Chain Partnerships. A fourth tutorial spoke more to tomorrow: The Business Case for Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development was keynote-speaker Carl Frankel’s topic and the theme of two plenary speakers, John Ehrenfeld of M.I.T. and Paul V. Tebo of DuPont. (See Sidebar “DFE: An Enabler to a Sustainable Age?”) With a stated objective of “achieving business suc-