A systematic review of environmentally conscious product design

Abstract

Recently environmentally conscious product design (ECPD) is highlighted by research community, because of the global conscious about low carbon emission and sustainable development. ECPD cares about the environmental, social and economic impacts of products during their life cycle phases, with the destination to achieve product life cycle design for sustainability. Furthermore, information and communication technologies are important for the implementation of computer-aided eco-design. The theories, methods, software tools about ECPD during 2005 to 2015 were reviewed in this work. Five most related aspects including product eco-design, design for disassembly (DFD), design for recycling (DFR), material selection (MS), and eco-design software tools were analyzed as related categories. Eco-impact assessment was found to be a pre-step in ECPD followed by product eco-innovation. DFD, DFR, and MS helped to improve the energy efficiency and eco-friendliness of products. Eco-design software tools are focusing on CAD-integration, web-based and knowledge base-based characteristics. More eco-design software tools will be developed in specific industries and to handling products with composite materials. Recently reviews related to ECPD are shown in Table 1. Though some reviews about eco-design, LCA, DFD, and material selection have been presented, the development of ECPD still need to be analyzed for the state-of-the-art. The aim of this article is to draw a state-of-the-art review for the most related aspects in ECPD. For the range of the research, in one aspect, over 70% of the product life cycle performance was decided in the design stage. In another aspect, environmentally conscious product manufacturing contains lots of aspects such as machine tools, processes, production planning, and supply chains. It will be difficult to cover eco-design and eco- manufacturing in one review article. Thus, literatures related in eco-design models, methods, and software were focused in this work. Our motivation is to obtain the current state and explore the future research directions for ECPD through literatures reviewing. Peer-reviewed papers in Web of Science TM core collection, also known as Science Citation Index (SCI) database were selected. The time period was limited within 2005 to 2015 to control the amount of literatures. The key words with topic containing were as follows: Design for environment (DFE), Environmentally conscious product design, Eco-design, Design for sustainability (D4S), Life cycle design (DFLC), Green modularization (GM), Design for disassembly (DFD), Design for recycling (DFR), Material selection (MS) and eco-design, Software tool and eco-design. Literatures concerning design of electromechanical products were reserved, and eco-design for aspects such as service, processes or society were omitted. Thus, approximate 120 references were classified and reviewed.