Optimization of eco-design decisions using a parametric life cycle assessment

The manufacturing industry consumes an excessive amount of materials, mainly from virgin sources and energy streams, which contributes significantly to global environmental problems such as climate change. To achieve sustainable development, the creation of eco-designs and their implementation in the manufacturing sector is crucial. However, it is tedious for product designers to generate alternative eco-designs and iteratively evaluate the mitigation of environmental hotspots. Therefore, this study proposes a parametric life cycle assessment (PLCA) approach to eco-design optimization and decision making at the early design stage. This proposed PLCA model reflects the characteristics of the environmental performance of the entire product life cycle as an objective function at the early design stage. In particular, this model allows designers to optimize the design and to mitigate environmental impacts, without performing scenario analysis. To illustrate the applicability of this approach, two case studies are presented, and the effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated for eco-design optimization and eco-design decision making. The results of the two case studies reveal that the developed objective function, which is expressed as a multi-variable optimization problem with constraints, can be used to generate optimum values for the product and process parameters that will have minimal environmental impacts. Therefore, it can be concluded that the PLCA based optimization approach in the early design stage of the product supports designers in their attempts to achieve the eco-design effortlessly. (C) 2021 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.