Due to the increasing pressure of legislations and market, the environmental sustainability is becoming a key competitive factor for companies. In specific markets, as the Northern Europe one, customers are very careful on the quality and sustainability of products, thus companies has to design and manufacture green goods. In this context, there is a strong need of effective design tools and platform which allows to configure products applying the life cycle paradigm and with the “environment on mind”. Currently in the market there are only few examples of products designed taking into account the eco-design concepts. In particular, for mechatronic or energy using products only the use phase is usually considered and all the re-design strategies aim to reduce the energy consumption. This is essentially due to the fact that there is a lack of tools and design platforms, which are easy to use and well integrated with the traditional design tools and with the design processes of companies.
This paper wants to demonstrate the usefulness of a set of interoperable eco-design tools, the G.EN.ESI platform, in supporting the re-design of a mechatronic product. The proposed case study, realized in collaboration with an Italian leading company in the sector of household appliances, focuses on the improvement of a domestic cooker hood with the final objective to obtain a more sustainable product. The in-depth experimentation, for the duration of more than 3 months, involved different stakeholders within the company (designers, environmental expert, etc.), with the aim to validate the G.EN.ESI platform tools in different phases of the re-design process. The case study showed that the use of the platform has supported the company in the identification of the environmental hot-spots and during the product re-design phase, considering the whole life cycle. The re-engineered cooker hood exhibits relevant improvements in the most important environmental and economic indicators (environmental impact, energy efficiency, disassemblability, recyclability, etc.). Also a detailed analysis of the platform usability has been performed in order to measure if the tools completely fulfil the expectations of the final users. Finally, the level of integration within the company processes has been evaluated with a dedicated questionnaire. The results of these last analyses showed that the G.EN.ESI platform is appropriate to support a company to improve the sustainability of their products without the needs to heavily alter the traditional design process.
Life Cycle Design and Efficiency Principles for Membrane Architecture: Towards a New Set of Eco-design Strategies
