Incorporating Environmental Issues in Product Design and Realization

In this paper, a number of options and issues are illustrated which companies and organizations seeking to incorporate environmental issues in product design and realization should consider. A brief overview and classification of a number of approaches for reducing the environmental impact is given, as well as their organizational impact. General characteristics, representative examples, and integration and information management issues of design tools supporting environmentally conscious product design are provided as well. 1 From Design for Manufacture to Design for the Life Cycle and Beyond One can argue that the “good old days” where a product was being designed, manufactured and sold to the customer with little or no subsequent concern are over. In the seventies, with the emergence of life-cycle engineering and concurrent engineering in the United States, companies became more aware of the need to include serviceability and maintenance issues in their design processes. A formal definition for Concurrent Engineering is given in (Winner, et al., 1988), as “a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements.” Although concurrent engineering seems to span the entire life-cycle of a product according to the preceding definition, its traditional focus has been on design, manufacturing, and maintenance. Perhaps one of the most striking areas where companies now have to be concerned is with the environment. The concern regarding environmental impact stems from the fact that, whether we want it or not, all our products affect in some way our environment during their life-span. In Figure 1, a schematic representation of a system’s life-cycle is given. Materials are mined from the earth, air and sea, processed into products, and distributed to consumers for usage, as represented by the flow from left to right in the top half of Figure 1.