Eco-Design for Product Lifecycle Sustainability

Eco-design plays a central role in balancing technical, economic, environmental, even social concerns in new product introduction (NPI) to achieve optimized sustainability performance throughout the product lifecycle. Applying eco-design and sustainability principles to the NPI process, this paper presents an integrated sustainable design approach to the modeling, analysis and improvement of product performance in lifecycle cost control, environmental impact reduction, and regulation compliance management. By integrating the sustainability analysis methods (e.g. life cycle assessment and life cycle costing) into product design and development, the approach establishes a methodological framework consisting of lifecycle sustainability metrics, inventory databases, and design support tools for design options comparison and decisions making in improvements of lifecycle sustainability. Use scenarios are discussed in the paper to demonstrate the use of the approach to eco-design of consumer electronic products.