A combination of life cycle assessment and knowledge based engineering to evaluate the sustainability of industrial products

The Life Cycle Thinking and the Knowledge Based Engineering approaches can be integrated in order to allow a preliminary-rough but effective Life Cycle Assessment, since the first phases of the design of an industrial product. In the present paper, we propose a general framework considering a number of different aspects, mainly concerning the manufacturing choices, but also related to the design of the product. The aim is to overcome the eco design paradox and to provide a tool supporting designer during the product concept to increase its sustainability

Numerical approaches towards life cycle interpretation five examples

The ISO-standard for LCA distinguishes four phases, of which the last one, the interpretation, is the least elaborated. It can be regarded as containing procedural steps (like a completeness check) as well as numerical steps (like a sensitivity check). This paper provides five examples of techniques that can be used for the numerical steps. These are the contribution analysis, the perturbation analysis, the uncertainty analysis, the comparative analysis, and the discernibility analysis. All five techniques are described at a non technical level with respect to basic concept, possibilities, tabular and graphical representation, restriction and warnings, and all are illustrated with a simple example