Autodesk, a maker of digital design technologies, has launched a Sustainable Materials Assistant for its Inventor program.

The Sustainable Materials Assistant was created to help designers make greener decisions by paying attention to if they are including toxic, hazardous or recyclable materials as well as figure out the carbon footprint of projects.

Users of Inventor, a program for making 3D prototypes, can input data on toxicity, carbon footprint, recyclability and regulatory information for materials, and later analyze the sustainability information of components or entire projects.

When reviewing a project, a Sustainability Report will pull out and highlight any data on materials in the project that has been entered regarding the four environmental subjects, allowing designs to easily check if the project contains toxic materials or has what could be too large of a carbon footprint.