Ensuring the environmental sustainability of products is challenging because it involves all the stages and processes throughout product life cycle. Product eco-design is essential to achieve it. In the proposed… Click to show full abstract
Ensuring the environmental sustainability of products is challenging because it involves all the stages and processes throughout product life cycle. Product eco-design is essential to achieve it. In the proposed methodology, product eco-design is implemented based on five eco-design elements, namely, function, material, geometric structure, connection relationship and manufacturing process. However, because of the fragmentation of existing eco-design tools, the gap between eco-design evaluation and eco-design optimisation requires a new mechanism to seamlessly integrate them for efficient industrial applications. A new checklist tool called Checklist of Product Eco-design Optimisation Potential (CPEOP) is developed to assess product eco-design optimisation potential. Based on the new tool, optimisation effect of product eco-design can be quantitatively assessed. Furthermore, a novel semi-quantitative method for task planning in product eco-design is proposed, which involves evaluating the product with CPEOP, screening candidates for eco-design and determining the candidates’ optimisation directions. The uncertainties arising from CPEOP and enterprise design status quo are further analysed. Subsequently, a case study on a refrigerator is conducted to elucidate the process of the method and reveal its potential. The proposed method is then discussed through a comparison with two mainstream eco-design tools.
               
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