The assessment of the environmental Sustainability

In recent years, the attention paid to Sustainable Development problems has certainly helped in sensitizing the industrial world, caused either by new specific standards and regulations oriented to the environmental impacts reduction, or by the more and more important request for "eco-products". In such a context, the importance of designers clearly stands out: the benefits of making "green" decisions in the early stages of the product design can be substantial. The goal of the research is the development of a Methodical Design approach to evaluate environmental sustainability of products, in order to find the right trend to follow to pursue improvements in design activity, which take into account not only the direct environmental impact of products, but also make their development economically feasible, extending their life, optimizing components assembly and foreseeing their re-use, disassembly and recycling. In particular, the adopted approach was based both on the use of the Ecodesign PILOT method, and on the use of the Quality Function Deployment for the Environment (QFDE). The aim of this research was that of showing the use of the above mentioned methods integrated with other methods and techniques, as a means of support in order to obtain a global assessment which does not neglect any aspect of the environmental impact.