- [Instructor] A lot of times when you're building a part
you have several different options
for the material to build that part out of.
This part here I could build out of aluminum,
I could build it out of steel.
I might even be able to injection mold it.
And I want to kind of look at what's going to happen
to the world or the sustainability of this product
if I change from material to material.
Inside of SOLIDWORKS under Evaluate
over here on the far right,
I've got a tool called Sustainability.
Go ahead and fire that up and you can see here it loads.
I've got some material I can choose from from the top.
So already I've got this steel, it's cauldron steel,
and I'm thinking hey this is great,
but what if I made this part from aluminum.
Aluminum alloy and I wanted to choose maybe 6061 alloy.
T6, it's going to make a few different changes
and you can see down here the carbon footprint,
the energy you use, the air quality, the water quality.
What's going to happen between the different material choices.
Over here it's saying hey the recycle content's zero,
that's kind of a bad one.
So maybe I can choose something else
that is a better choice.
What's this 1060 alloy?
Again, zero content in aluminum,
so maybe just raw material is not coming as recycled.
I'll take a look at iron, ductile iron.
Wow, recycled content is 84%.
That's a lot of recycled content, which is great.
And you can see what the effect is
that brought everything down quite a bit,
everything's in the green.
So by selecting different materials
and looking at them over a certain period of time.
Obviously you can change the duration of use for this,
you can change the method you're calculating
things with down here.
You can import baselines and save things out
down here at the bottom.
But this tool is going to allow you to kind of evaluate
one material against another and see
what's going to be better as far as the environmental impact,
as far as material, manufacturing use,
end of life as well as transportation.
So definitely take a look at Sustainability.
It's a pretty handy tool, especially if you're considering
different materials and what they're going to do
over the long run.