An Energy-Related Products Compliant Eco-Design Method with Durability-Embedded Economic and Environmental Assessments

Abstract

Assessing the environmental impacts of product systems has become critical, with emphasis on reducing carbon dioxide emissions in line with the new climate change regime. Accordingly, environmental regulations have been newly issued or have stronger requirements for inducing more energy-efficient and environmentally-conscious product development. Therefore, product developers in new product development are being forced to consider various and heterogeneous design performance and are encountering more difficulty and chaos when selecting the best product design among design candidates. The relevant studies have contributed to providing tools and techniques for increasing the environmental soundness of the product; however, they do not holistically accommodate the quantification of functional and economic metrics, nor do they incorporate the compliance with recent environmental legislations. The present work proposes an environmentally-conscious design method that integrates functional, economic, and environmental assessments with the compliance of the energy-related products (ErP) legislation. This method provides analytical capabilities including: (1) a functional assessment to derive the durability of the product to be embedded for practical measurement in the following assessments, (2) a compliance check to ensure that energy-related products fulfill the ErP directive enacted by the European Union, (3) an economic assessment to calculate the total cost during the product lifecycle by using the life cycle cost concept, and (4) an environmental assessment to quantify the environmental loads of the product by using a simplified life cycle assessment. The present work also includes a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method; to this end, two different electronic vacuum cleaners are compared. The results of the present work help product developers use life cycle design thinking for determining their design parameters by checking their compliance with the ErP legislation and assessing economic and environmental metrics with a mechanical analysis of the durability of product systems.