EcoAudit: a Renewed Simplified Procedure to Facilitate the Environmentally Informed Material Choice Orienting the Further Life Cycle Analysis for Ecodesigners

Abstract

Design process determines 80% of the whole environmental impact generated by a product or service. This paper intends to describe a simplified renewed procedure for the analysis and selection of materials capable of providing fast and reliable information to those designers that are interested to minimize the life-cycle environmental burden of products and services, the so called EcoAudit. The here presented EcoAudit procedure assesses the burden associated to a component/product by means of a customized set of environmental impact indicators, without exploring all parameters that are usually provided by a LCA study. The set of environmental impact indicators that are here adopted for this purpose are the energy consumption (energy breakdown in terms of direct and indirect contributors, MJ per functional unit), the global warming potential (in terms of CO2 equiv per functional unit) and the end of life possibilities (in terms of effective practicable scenarios, i.e. of recycling). The first two indicators may be intended as ‘‘key environmental performance indicators’’ (‘‘KEPIs’’). This approach allows a fast preliminary ranking of materials and processes identifying the most relevant critical phases of a system, making the ecodesign process really starting. The integration within the Cambridge Engineering Selector 2009 EcoAudit tool allows to search and browse materials data, calculating the environmental load in a real time. [doi:10.2320/matertrans.MH200918]