Simple tools
 Things
should be as simple as possible, but not any simpler than that. Good
answers do not need to be based on extensive studies.
Life cycle based guidelines
and simple indicators can be practical tools in the product development process.
Guidelines
Since the early nineties we
have a webpage with basic
ecodesign guidelines that is often referred to.
Guidelines like these are valid in general, but often you need
more specific guidelines for the products you are
working on.
For instance, it is more important to reduce vehicle
weight than to improve recyclability of car components. Or more specific: reducing car
weight with 1 kg saves 4 to 8 litres of fuel over the
life cycle. Guidelines like these are easily understood and memorised
by designers.
PRé Consultants can work
with you to develop such more specific guidelines. Guidelines can be
easily combined with the Key environmental Performance Indicators (KePI).
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Key performance indicators
LCA results provide a
science based picture of the impacts associated with a product or
service system. The units in which LCA results are expressed are not
always meaningful to non experts, like designers and
product managers. They think of a product as having a certain
composition of materials, a certain amount of energy used in the
lifecycle etc.
With key performance
indicators, we translate LCA results in meaningful
indicators. Often the environmental load is related to indeed simple
indicators, like the mass of certain materials, energy use,
transport efficiency or end of life options.
What PRé
Consultants can do is to make a (screening) LCA or to use an existing
LCA to propose a limited set of indicators (such as mass, percentage
recycled content, energy use, transport volume etc.) depending on
what is really relevant for your product group.
The concept of KePI’s is
also central in the IPP process and the energy using products (EuP)
directive.
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Eco-indicators
Eco-indicators are single
scores that express the total environmental load of materials and
processes. The higher the score, the higher the load. This
simplicity is very attractive for designers that want to have a
clear guidance system. The method
to calculate eco-indicators was developed by a team lead by PRé
Consultants.
Over the years, many
standard lists of eco-indicators have been computed. The standard
list of 200 indicators can be found in the Eco-indicator
Manual for
Designers (PDF), and our easy to use software tool
ECO-it.
The
PRé Consultancy team can extend the list of indicators to cover the
materials and processes that are important for your product group, but that are
not yet published.
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