Incorporating sustainable concepts for product design, development and manufacturing

Abstract

In the general product design and development process, only the increment of economical benefits has been considered but the effectiveness on the environment or society has not been considered. The responsibility of the manufacture should be focused on a successful product design and development process in order to avoid or minimize harmful or bad ecological, social, and economical effects. Past researches such as Re-considering product design: a practical “road-map” for integration of sustainability issues, Design for sustainability a step by step (Sissel A. Waage, 2006) approach, gives pathways for designers and business decision makers and presents the effectiveness of the world production with the key elements of sustainability. However, these sustainable concepts have not been considered at the right stages of the product design and development process in order to increase the overall sustainability of any manufacturing firm while increasing financial benefits. In order to bridge the gap, this research focuses on incorporating all applicable sustainability concepts at each phase of the product design and development process and other relevant sub functions of manufacturing planning and control namely process planning, facility location, plant layout design etc. The relevant sustainability impacts were identified at each of these stages initially. Later a flow chart was developed for the whole process. Two folded approach was used for validation of the proposed methodology. First, selected household consumer products were manufactured at the faculty workshops to observe adapted sustainability methodology and compared with the existing products in the market. Later several manufacturing industries were selected to study the current product design and development processes and manufacturing processes (Life cycle of the products) and data were collected by conducting a field survey. SimaPro software was used to analyse quantitative effects of the process along with proposed methodology to analyse qualitative information. The worst phase of product lifecycle was identified by eco indicator 99 of SimaPro. It was found that eco indicator 99 of SimaPro only highlights environmental impacts at macro scale and proposed methodology highlights environmental impacts at micro and macro levels and two other bottom lines of sustainability: social and economical aspects. Furthermore, it can be found that all industries considered for this research are at the zero level of sustainability in manufacturing.