A life cycle approach to component design

Automotive component designers will be faced with a barrage of legislation in the next century, focusing on reduced environmental impact. Issues, such as ''end-of-life'' product take-back and reduced landfill burden, will mean that new tools are needed to aid the designer to arrive at a fully balanced solution. Techniques such as Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) have been advocated to assess the environmental consequences of a product, studying the whole life cycle from ''cradle to grave''. Using the results of such studies has proved to be problematical, therefore the designer has demanded that a more pragmatic approach should be adopted. The approach chosen uses several tools to support the environmental considerations of component design. LCA supports a Design For Environment (DFE) methodology which allows the LCA results to be used in a meaningful way. Streamlining has been adopted to focus the LCA on the immediate environmental requirements. Therefore, DFE helps to define the level of the study and translates the results of the LCA into a meaningful form which can be used by designers. An example of this is given by the improvements that have been made into the assessment of the environmental burden of the product in ''use''. This phase of the life cycle is dominant in most automotive studies and therefore warrants closer investigation.