Environmental Impact Assessment of Product Lifespan: The Role of Consumer’s Repair Behavior and Critical Components Deterioration

Consumers might be willing to repair their broken devices as long as the associated repair costs do not exceed an undesirable threshold. However, in many cases the technological obsolescence actuates consumers to retire old devices and replace them with new ones rather than extending the product lifecycle through repair. In this paper, we aim to investigate the impact of components’ deterioration profiles and consumers’ repair decisions on the lifespan of devices, and then assesse the anticipated life cycle environmental impacts. A Monte Carlo simulation is developed to estimate the life cycle characteristics such as the average lifespan, the number of failed components’ replacement, and the total repair cost per cycle for a laptop computer. The lifecycle characteristics estimated from simulation model further have been used in a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study to quantify the environmental impact associated with different design scenarios. The results reveal the impact of product design as well as consumers’ repair decisions on the product lifespan and the corresponding environmental impacts.

Standardization in service audit

The authors of the article studied opportunities and prospects of development of the enterprise service standards complex and defined the components of this complex. It appears that the service standards complex is necessary also for service audit. In the article the service audit is considered as a part of internal audit system and as a part of voluntary external audit. Due to this, it is necessary to ensure the continuity of practice of these types of audit with reference to the developed methodology of service audit. It is expected that the service audit is directed at the assessment of completeness of the service provided by the company and its conformity with needs of consumers. The proposal of the service audit conception presupposes the necessity to define what objects are to be standardized, what set of standards are to be created in order to conduct service audit and achieve representative results. Therefore, the authors presented the results of comparative analysis of development of inner audit methodology with regard to its procedures and principles standardization. The article comprises the main principles of service audit standardization that includes analogue method. Particularly, it was proved that it was expedient to single out the service standards complex and the complex of principles (standards) of service audit conduction. According to the authors, the first group includes service standards of various stages of the proposed product lifespan. The complex of principles (standards) of service audit constitutes the standards that allow to define the object and the subject of service audit, auditor requirements, the procedure of preparation and implementation of a service audit program, requirements for service audit results report etc.