As Lunar Design strives to bring sustainability to product design, it's developed a company-wide initiative, called Elements, to guide both the greening of its internal operations and the products it makes.

Travis Lee, Lunar's sustainable engineering lead, and Alberto Villarreal , the company's senior lead designer, spoke with GreenBiz Radio about clients asking for greener designs, the challenges of lowering product impacts, and how Lunar helped HP reduce materials and save money.

Jonathan Bardelline: How does Lunar Design approach the issue of sustainability with clients? Does it depend on the client, on the project or is it something that you try to integrate into every project?

Travis Lee: Well, it's generally one or the other and sometimes a little bit of both. We've approached, especially early on in a lot of our more sustainable endeavors, we approached it from a place where we were definitely introducing it to a lot of our clients and trying to work it in. But it was in a much less, I think, obvious way. It wasn't in the way that we work in other types of work like putting it in proposals and having it as a line item on the schedule. It was more as a general discussion to try and get their feel for it.

We did have clients approach us from time to time with some sustainable ideas. They were, at the beginning, usually fairly small. They weren't very large in scope. They were just, "Hey, can we reduce some material here? Could we lighten this up a little bit there?" Those were a little few and far between, but they did happen.

These days, it's a little more involved how we approach our clients. In some cases, we do actually put line items in the schedule and in the proposal that are focused purely on sustainability, whether they're life cycle analyses or just general sustainability input and review.

But throughout all of the projects, regardless of whether they have a very obvious sustainability lean or not, I think we're big believers in that little changes in the design, they don't always have to be on that level where, sometimes where clients are even involved. Sustainable design is such a nuanced and everyday practice that it can be sort of done just as a normal part of what we do. So it just becomes wrapped up in the overall package.

And we don't really have to point it out, I think, is the goal.  So, Alberto, do you have anything to add?

Alberto Villarreal: It's also, like you said, it's becoming more and more natural for clients to include that in the conversations at least. And it's also becoming kind of just another tool or just another step in the design process that we have to touch base on. 

Hopefully this is going to be becoming a stronger requirement and starting to become also part of the briefings and part of the requirements documents that the clients come to us as opposed to just being part of the conversation. So we are seeing that more and more with some of our clients.

JB: And are you seeing clients being more educated on some of these issues, when they're coming to you, they start talking about specific things they want to see out of the end product instead of it coming from you and saying, "Did you know you could do this? Do you know you could do that?" Is it more clients have an idea of what they want out of their products?

TL: From time to time. It usually takes some prodding to get the right person in the room. I would say often when these projects get started, it's not uncommon to have to really ask who the sustainability steward is and if we can get in touch with them and if we can start the conversation with them. 

And it's natural for not all of the project managers at larger companies to be trained in this and there are a lot of projects going on at once. And so I think it's important to get a hold of the right people who have that knowledge and that pull within the company to make things happen. And once you make that contact, those people are very helpful and full of good ideas. 

JB: Could you talk a bit about the Elements initiative, since you're both on the Elements team and I'm specifically interested in some of the best practices that you've researched and cataloged as part of that initiative.

TL: Sure. The Elements initiative was really a coalescing of individual initiatives that were going on here at Lunar for years and years. We had individual designers and engineers working on sustainable design at their own pace with their own data and information gathering.