Improving sustainability in product development projects

Abstract

Sustainable product development initiatives have been evolving for some time to support companies improve the efficiency of current production and the design of new products and services through supply chain management. The development of different methods and tools for considering environmental criteria in the same way as conventional design criteria through an Eco-design approach were carried out. Environmental assessment tools are generally based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) method, which can inform production and consumption choices because it assess the environmental performance of a product through accounting all the energy and material inputs and the associated emissions and waste outputs at each stage of its life cycle. While using LCA to measure the environmental dimension of sustainability is widespread, similar approaches for the economic (LCC) and the social (S-LCA) dimensions of sustainability still have limited application worldwide and there is need for consistent and robust methods and indicators. This paper focuses on the production step and presents the redesign process of an airbrush in order to improve their sustainability performance. According to LCA evaluation methods, an approach based on the analysis of the flows exchanged by the industrial installation throughout the production step was developed. Different sustainability indicators were obtained. In particular, the environmental indicator of global warming, the economic indicator of value added and the social indicator of working hours were used to assess the sustainability performance. An improvement of the redesigned product indicators was achieved.