A utilitarian approach for environmental impact evaluation in new product development

Abstract

Today "eco design" is a necessary consideration in the product development process. With increasing general awareness of need for environmental protection and more stringent regulatory requirements, manufacturers have to try to minimise the environmental impact of their products. The push for environmental consideration has added new decision criteria in the evaluation of design alternatives. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a generally accepted quantitative approach that can be applied to support environmental performance evaluations of a product. However, despite the time consuming attribute of the LCA, it has difficulty to deal with uncertain or limited product information at the initial product development stage. Therefore, LCA is yet to be a practical approach for product designers in small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs). This research project probes into the key challenges of implementing products' environmental impact evaluation in new product development. Through identifying the limitations and deficiencies of the existing LCA approach, the researcher develops a practical utilitarian approach for product designers to evaluate design alternatives to bridge the gap between the LCA concept and the difficulties of its use in practice. The proposed utilitarian approach is based on the "life-cycle" concept, incorporating Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy-set theory (FST) with LCA to evaluate design alternatives' environmental impact. The resulting normalised environmental impact values are used for prioritising design alternatives. A pilot study of this utilitarian approach has been carried out to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, the proposed approach is able to quantify uncertain information and use it to evaluate design alternatives' environmental impact. The uncertainty and incomplete information is captured by the combination of AHP with FST, and a fast-track LCA is adopted to assess the environmental impact on design alternatives and their results are represented by fuzzy values. Further case examples have been carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the integrated utilitarian approach. A computer programme is developed to complement the implementation of the proposed approach to evaluate the environmental impact of design alternatives during NPD. The use of this utilitarian approach is compared with the conventional LCA methodology which required highly pivotal qualitative judgements from experts. The proposed utilitarian approach serves as a fast-track solution for product designers who may have limited knowledge of LCA in the evaluations of design alternatives' environmental impact. This is a valuable contribution because during new product development, comprehensive LCA studies cannot generally be carried out because of aforementioned deficiency of LCA or lack of time and resources. The results of this research have been published in a conference proceeding and four international journals.

Date of Award	15 Jul 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Kong Bieng CHUAH (Supervisor)