Ecodesign Tool for Increased Sustainability and Requirements Fulfilment, including Repairability and Critical Raw Materials Analysis

Ecodesign of products is an increasingly important part of preparing companies for the growing number of regulations and customer demands for a more environmentally friendly economy and society. This paper presents the back-end and database structure of a tool that allows for optimizing ecodesign that is currently in development. Since the number of eco-indicators is so large, product designers face a significant challenge in optimizing their products for the environment. The proposed tool will support the user in meeting sustainability requirements from legislation, their company, and product division while maintaining a proficient performance on other indicators. Furthermore, it allows the user to understand and navigate trade-offs between indicators that make implementing sustainable product design difficult. It includes eco-indicators from LCA and provides a link to a critical raw material dashboard based on the EU criticality assessment methodology, which allows the user to understand the criticality factors of the materials used. Furthermore, it includes a drill down of repairability according to norm EN 45554. This allows the user to specify a repairability assessment method for their product and compare different designs in terms of repairability. Summarizing, the tools enable the product designer to make informed decisions for their ecodesign.