Combining life cycle assessment and online customer reviews to design more sustainable products - Case study on a printing machine

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a standardized methodology to quantify the environmental footprint of products, processes, and systems. While LCA is an internationally accepted tool to highlight environmental hotspots, it lacks in providing concrete guidance to practitioners (e.g., product designers, material engineers, industrial managers) to reduce the ecological impact of their products. In parallel, a tremendous amount of product reviews is written each day online by actual users of the product. We may reasonably assume that these online product reviews contain valuable information to designers that can lead to improving the sustainability of the products they develop. In the present study, we investigate and experiment how the deployment of LCA combined with the mining and interpretation of online customer reviews could lead to the design of more sustainable products. The proposed approach is applied to a basic printing machine where LCA results are combined with the information collected from sustainability-related online reviews to identify sustainable design leads for the next generation of eco-designed printers. For discussion and validation purposes, the results are compared with a new-generation printer having an environmental certification, the EPEAT ecolabel.