Assessment of Products Eco-Efficiency for the goal of Eco-Design
Résumé
The products are strongly related to environment sustainability during their life cycle. It is well known that largely of the environmental damages from product life cycle are determined in the earlier design process. Hence the product design has crucial role for product sustainability. An effective improvement of product sustainability during the design phase should be achieved if the designers have appropriate methods (and tools) for assessment of product sustainability. In the paper the eco-efficiency concept is applied in product design phase. The main challenge in product eco-efficiency assessment is environmental damage, caused from product during its life cycle. In the paper, integrating of two approaches for this purpose are proposed: quantification of damages by using external costs and approaches for obtaining score (or %) assessment of product sustainability elements. This integration enables to assess the environmental damages of more sustainability elements for more reliable assessment of eco-efficiency and hence for more sustainable product design.