The "Green Design Advisor": A tool for design for environment

Since European and national legislation is shifting responsibility for discarded products more and more to the producer, the need for efficient tools to evaluate and improve products with regard to their environmental impact is increasing. In this paper, the results of a beneficial cooperation between industry and university in the area of environmental evaluation and optimization of products is presented. The developed Design for Environment (DFE) tool "Green Design Advisor" (GDA) is currently implemented as a best practice DFE-tool into industry. As the knowledge about the end-of-life behavior of a product is essential for the environmental evaluation, a specific method for the end-of-life simulation is an important issue of the paper. Furthermore, the integration and enlargement of this end-of-life related evaluation into a DFE-method is described. The resulting tool also includes features to detect environmental product design weaknesses, by using special characteristic values that have been developed. Those allow, along with a tailored integrated optimization sequence, the efficient use of the software to achieve significant design improvements.