Ecological profile of industrial products over the environmental compliance

Abstract

Customers' awareness of environmental concerns is following an upward trend nowadays, pushing companies to put on the market an ever larger range of ‘green products’. This is also due to the extension of the types of products falling in the scope of environmental legislation (which in European Union requires the new environmental CE (“Conformité Européenne”, i.e. European Conformity) marking for most of industrial products). The research work carried out focuses on the development of a procedure for the definition of the products' ecological profile (EP), making the control and management of their environmental performances affordable also for non-experts. The proposed methodology, named Life Cycle Compliance for Ecodesign (LCCE), allows engineers to evaluate the product's eco-virtuosity, i.e. the environmental improvements over mandatory requisites, taking into account the whole product's life cycle. The methodology was developed throughout the collaboration with manufacturers of different types of products. Results obtained showed that the LCCE methodology resulted in being an easy-to-use ecodesign tool, able not only to manage the conformity of products but also to define the limit of environmental improvements which can be foreseen for the product (i.e. the value over which it is more convenient to re-think the product and its life cycle, rather than upgrading it).