The growing emphasis on sustainability integrates eco-design and life cycle analysis into product development. Despite the value of LCAs, data limitations lead to assumptions, impacting accuracy. This study compares an estimation-based LCA with a data-driven approach, focusing on a laser machine's operational phase. The significant influence of resource consumption during operation underscores the necessity of optimization. Applying a data-driven approach reveals a 24% difference compared to the estimation-based method, emphasizing the challenges in obtaining accurate data for effective LCAs.

This research examines how sustainable product design education can address the deficit in green talent. It presents a framework for a structured curriculum in product design, with hands-on activities, industry-specific case studies, and best practices in alternative design development. The impact of technologies like additive manufacturing on design is considered. Findings demonstrate that knowledge of technological capabilities, industry specific understanding, and proficiency in analytical tools such as Life Cycle Assessments contribute to sustainable designs mitigating a green talent gap.

Multiple industries have hailed lightweighting promise to reduce the mass of their product at equivalent or improved performance. Lightweighting as a strategy encompasses lightweight end-product desired attributes and through-life processing decisions. Assessment of lightweighting gathers information for decision-making towards the optimization of these strategies. An exploratory study, using systems thinking is conducted, to identify requirements of lightweighting and its assessment in terms of holistically defining its impact on the sustainability of its background system, the Earth.

To face environmental requirements in the design area, it is crucial to work on the education of younger generation to sustainable design. But literature shows there is a growing need for both teachers and learners to develop pedagogical support to help the integration of sustainable concerns and tools in the education. This article focuses on Life Cycle Assessment in the scope of an ecodesign process. Through a case study, the aim is to illustrate it with firstly a succinct version of the LCA of an electric kettle and then suggestions of ecodesign strategies based on the outcomes of the LCA.

Although Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments (LCSA) are important in evaluating the sustainability of complex products and services, there is no sufficient support for engineers performing LCSA. The concept of an Engineering Graph focuses on the relations of data within engineering. It provides a model that leverages existing data in engineering and extendibility to include specialized databases and open and public data from the semantic web. This paper proposes a concept of how Engineering Graphs can be used to address the issues of LCSA and support engineers.

The sustainability of rigid packaging can be increased by using biocomposites in packaging. Existing frameworks have some limitations such as are made to assess a few aspects, conventional packaging parameters are considered, etc. Biocomposite has a slightly different scenario at various life cycle stages, like the end-of-life cycle process. To assess the sustainability of biocomposite rigid packaging, we must consider parameters related to the biocomposite-based rigid packaging materials life cycle. These are categorised into different aspects of sustainability and life cycle phases.

Environmental issues such as climate change are leading to sustainability challenges for the aerospace industry. New materials such as composites allow significant weight reduction, which leads to a lower fuel consumption. However, composites involve complex processes and there is a lack of knowledge on their social and environmental consequences. Through two cases based on real aero-engines components, this paper shows that the weight savings provided by composites reduce significantly the CO2 emissions during flight which compensates the environmental drawbacks from production and recycling.

Though many engineering schools are integrating sustainability in the curriculum, most are still struggling, especially with social sustainability. The aim with this study was to test a process created to help students work systematically with these issues. Results show that students in the study did indeed benefit from structured process support as their general knowledge level of social sustainability issues as well as their understanding of how to integrate them in a product assessment was very low. Reflections from teaching staff on how to further develop such a process are also shared.

This study aims to generate a referential basis on which the designer can reflect about and explore scenarios during the structural and graphic packaging projects. “Packing Radar (RE)” has been compiled over years of research as it is spread across different sources and areas of expertise. This qualitative research uses content analysis and expert's opinions. The (RE) proposition shows its potential for improvement and diagnosis of sustainable packaging projects, of teaching activities and packaging professionals graduation.

The European Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC) explicitly specifies the hierarchyfor waste management: prevention, preparation for re-use, recycling, other recoveryactions, disposal. When selecting waste management options, this waste hierarchy should befollowed. A deviation can only be justified by Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) on the overallimpacts. The application of this principle in the Flemish waste management practicetriggered the need for evaluation of treatment options for several waste streams.Alternative treatments were evaluated for waste batteries, used frying oils and waste oil.The evaluation methodology combined life cycle assessment with technical and economicalviability criteria. These cases show that LCT does not allow to establish a “generalpriority order”. In each case reasons for deviation from the standard waste hierarchycould be given, but also none of the evaluated options can be considered as the best. Theevaluation showed that the priority is largely dependent on location-specificcharacteristics of inputs, outputs, processes and installations and that the establishmentof local and global environmental priorities always implies a value choice. In thispresentation, we will present the results of the three cases and provide a methodologicalframework for life cycle thinking in waste management policy.

Ecosystem goods and services (EGSs) are of crucial importance for the economic and socialdevelopment of human communities. The well-established life cycle assessment (LCA) methodis facing a number of challenging improvements to define new Characterization factors(CFs) for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) of EGSs. Very recently, extensive workconducted under the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle initiative has been completed with the goal ofproviding new LCIA methods and spatially differentiated mid-point CFs for land use andland use change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the implementedmodels do not enable one to assess the actual damage to ecosystem functionality, and thusthe relationship among EGSs and related areas of protection (e.g. AoP of “NaturalResources”) remains undefined. This paper aims at investigating the potentialcharacterization ability of the Emergy method for LCIA of EGSs. The goal is to use theextensive libraries of Unit Emergy Values (UEVs) of primary services and resources as CFsfor LCIA to evaluate the physical contribution of EGSs in supporting life cycle processes.Having its roots in thermodynamics and systems ecology, Emergy can appraise a larger andmore diversified (than LCA) number of EGSs through a common physical denominator, i.e. thesolar emjoule or seJ, which measures the solar energy embodied in natural products. Emergythus has a typical Nature-oriented perspective, accounting for the available energy thatis used up by the natural cycles, directly and indirectly, to generate biotic and abioticresources. A library of selected UEVs (more than 100) for biophysical EGS valuation hasbeen framed including values collected from the Emergy literature and formulated on thelatest planetary baseline (i.e. 15.2E + 24 seJ/yr). Advantages and limitations for futureapplication of these values toward an LCIA mid-point impact characterization of Emergy arediscussed. UEVs may represent mid-point LCIA factors for ecological contribution analysis,enabling one to account for the memory of energy previously required to produce EGSs,which can be used as a proxy to assess the future environmental work necessary toregenerate the used EGSs. However, the added value of Emergy for LCA is still debated,mainly because of the low accuracy and unclear meaning of the UEVs in relation to theavailability of resources. Therefore, Emergy can be conceived as a suitable physicalmeasure complementary to the economic valuations and current “user-side” tools applied inLCA.