A framework for assessing product End-Of-Life performance: reviewing the state of the art and proposing an innovative approach using an End-of-Life Index

Sustainable product development has become an important consideration by many product manufacturers in recent years. Manufacturers are adopting the life cycle approach in the development of products by incorporating the End-of-Life stage considerations at the design stage. To achieve this, however, there is the need to fill up the knowledge gap between the End-of-Life stage and design stage. Tools and methodologies for Design for End-of Life are required to assist designers to design products with better End-of-Life performance. In this paper, a novel Design for End-of-Life methodology is proposed. The methodology captures, represents and analyses the knowledge from the End-of-Life stage into a product End-of-Life Index. The index enables designers to make informed decision on design alternatives for optimal product End-of-Life performance using information from the End-of-Life stage. A case study illustrating the application of this End-of-Life Index on a power tool is subsequently presented. From the discussion, it was shown that the index was able to help to assess the End-of-Life performance of the design and also the changes made subsequently. In essence, this work done here has been demonstrated to be of assistance to designer to adopt Design for End-of-Life.