Assement for product sustainability

The issue of implementing sustainable development concepts into a product needs to be addressed urgently. However, this is hampered by the lack of an assessment tool which could provide useful information to the designer, manufacturer and the user. In this paper, a new scheme based on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development Eco-efficiency principles has been developed into a hierarchical assessment system. The rationale and architecture of this new assessment tool is full described. A case example on 'Product Durability' is given to illustrate the operation of this new assessment tool.