From Product End-of-Life Sustainable Considerations to Design Management

Overview & Synopsis

Better understanding of the current product End-of-life sustainable practices leads to important feedback for the design of more "sustainable" so called eco-products, by identifying the design improvements that reduce the impact of manufactured goods on the environment and society. In this paper, we propose a way to assess the impact on product design that ultimately helps on deciding the product characteristics required for a desired End-of-life (EOL) practice (i.e. reuse, recycle, remanufacture, etc). Categories and criticality scales of impacts of these practices on the product design stages are proposed. Then, a framework is proposed to provide designers with guidance on how to proceed towards taking into account the impact of the sustainable requirements.