Simplified environmental impact drivers for product life cycle

Abstract

The early design stage of product development often has limited information available to designers. The environmental impacts of a products life cycle are widely assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA). Nevertheless, as LCA is a costly and time-consuming method, the previous study shown the development of simplified LCA (SLCA) drivers of the entire product life cycle stages for the conceptual design stage. These SLCA drivers were developed based on a full LCA analysis of the Eco-indicator99 H/A method and the classification of the hierarchical clustering method as well as verified with case studies. So far, only the single score values of the driver were presented briefly. Therefore, this paper emphasises further on the results of the SLCA model by explicitly presenting the SLCA drivers into four different results, namely major emission substances, major impact categories, damage categories and single score for the process cases of all product life cycle stages.