ECO-Fusion, integrated software for environmentally-conscious production

An integrated environmental software program called ECO-Fusion has been developed as a tool for support of environmentally-conscious production, in particular in relation to the manufacture of electronic products. When the environmental impact of manufacturing and use of an actual product needs to be determined, the main problems are description of product composition and product life-cycle, storage of these data, and correspondence of various environmental estimation techniques. To solve these problems, ECO-Fusion features product-centered description, an object-oriented product database, and multifaceted environmental evaluation. The product-centered description is created by using the input system, the product list window, the composition window, and the life-cycle flow window. Product composition is represented by a tree structure with a product root in the composition window, and product life-cycle flow is represented by a coupled-tree structure with a product root in the life-cycle flow window. This input system allows simple modeling of complicated compositions and life-cycles for actual products. The object-oriented product database is suitable for storing the relationships of components, attributes of the components, relationships between processes, and attributes of the processes. Multifaceted evaluation is achieved by implementing three evaluation techniques: environmental product assessment, life-cycle assessment (LCA), and assembly/disassembly evaluation. In environmental product assessment, a product is compared with a reference product using and about 30 criteria on an environmental checksheet.