Abstract
The growing recognition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been integrated globally into product design and business activities. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is considered a useful tool for designers to apply in the early stages of product design to mitigate the environmental impact. The study aims to identify the challenges of applying simplified LCA tools to improve the eco-efficiency of products and achieve a higher level of sustainable innovation. The study was conducted in a sustainable design course at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, for four consecutive years. All challenges and opportunities by using ECO-it, Eco-indicators, and the Materials, Energy use, and Toxic emissions (MET) matrix to assess the environmental impact in each phase of 11 home appliances are presented and discussed. Results show the positive potential of applying the tools to achieve function innovation in design for sustainable innovation. The needs for guided instruction, the availability of the database, the complexity of a study product, and the overlooking of social dimensions are four major challenges in applying the tools in the early stages of product redesign. Further study in testing the tools and developing a database in collaboration with industries should be conducted to compare and validate the results.
Highlights
The awareness of social and environmental problems has been increasing over the past decade
The results are divided into two parts: the application of simplified Life cycle assessment (LCA) tools, and the challenges and opportunities identified from simplified LCA tools applied by industrial design students
New redesign proposals represent a positive potential of applying the simplified LCA tools to achieve the level of function innovation in sustainable innovation
Summary
The awareness of social and environmental problems has been increasing over the past decade. Businesses and corporates have to pay closer attention to the design and development of products that improve the social and environmental performances of the entire product life cycle. Can be a helpful tool in Ecodesign if integrated into the company structure [2] and can be used to improve the environmental performance and determine the sustainability baseline of products [3,4]. Six types of LCA-based tools for designers and product developers are presented. Recent review works show that several case studies of LCA-based tools applied by designers in the Americas and European countries are published widely in the academic and gray literature [2,3,4,6,9,12,13,14,15,16]. According to timing in the tool application to different stages of the product development process, Bauman and Tillman [19] categorized LCA-based Ecodesign tools into six types: matrices, dedicated software-based LCA, ordinary quantitative LCA, LCA-derived rules of thumb and proxies, combination tools, and LCA as a creative tool
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