Eco-designing the use phase of products in sustainable manufacturing : the importance of maintenance and communication-to-user strategies
Sanyé Mengual, Esther (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Pérez López, Paula
González García, Sara
García Lozano, Raúl
Feijoo Costa, Gumersindo
Moreira, Maria Teresa
Gabarrell Durany, Xavier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Rieradevall, Joan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Data:	2014
Resum:	Sustainable manufacturing has increasingly included design for environment methodologies with the objective of improving the environmental performance of products over their entire life cycles. Current European Union (EU) directives on eco-design focus on the use phase of energy-related products (ErPs). However, the maintenance of various household non-ErPs is performed with ErPs; therefore, the environmental impacts of product maintenance have an important role in the life cycle of non-ErPs. This article presents two eco-design studies where the implementation of improvement strategies of the use and maintenance phase of products had relevant results. Furthermore, environmental communication-to-user strategies were important to ensure the commitment of users toward eco-efficient behaviors. First, a knife was eco-designed according to strategies which focused on materials, processing, maintenance, and communication to user. By applying eco-design in a cradle-to-consumer scope, improvements decreased the environmental impact of the eco-designed product by 30%. However, when considering the entire life cycle of the eco-designed product, environmental impacts could be reduced by up to 40% and even up to ≈93% (depending on the cleaning procedure) as a result of large improvements in the maintenance stage. Second, a woman's jacket was eco-designed following multifunctionality, recycled materials, and efficient maintenance strategies. The new Livingstone jacket reached environmental improvements between 32% and 52% in the indicators analyzed. In this case, maintenance contributed between 40% and 87% of the reduction. As shown in this study, maintenance behavior and communication-to-user strategies are crucial to the eco-design of different household products (traditional vs. flexible design) and their consideration in the design process can reduce their environmental impact by between 40% and 80%.
Drets:	Tots els drets reservats.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió sotmesa a revisió
Matèria:	Communication to user ; Eco-design ; Eco-efficiency ; Energy-related products ; ErPs ; Industrial ecology ; Innovation
Publicat a:	Journal of industrial ecology, Vol. 18 Issue 4 (August 2014) , p. 545-577, ISSN 1088-1980

DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12161

Pre-print 35 p, 519.9 KB

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Documents de recerca > Documents dels grups de recerca de la UAB > Centres i grups de recerca (producció científica) > Ciències > Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) > Sostenibilitat i Prevenció Ambiental (Sostenipra)
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