Green design tool

Product design decisions have significant impact on the environment at all stages of the product life cycle. The designer can make significant contribution to the environmental impact of a product by including design for environment (DFE) criteria up-front in the design phase. The up-front incorporation of DFE criteria adds design rules and guidelines above and beyond the current design criteria. The interdisciplinary nature of DFE, and, at times, its contradictory criteria can make its implementation confusing and overwhelming, at least at the beginning. To help alleviate the confusion and facilitate the acceptance and eventual incorporation of DFE as part of product design criteria, both the product design and product management community need a friendly DFE tool. In this paper we put forth a framework for the development of a user-friendly, easy-to-use software tool that should help both managers and product and process designers evaluate the environmental compatibility of products and their associated manufacturing processes. Of particular interest to the authors is the manufacture of electronic components and assemblies which involve process intensive, semi-continuous, and repetitive wet chemical and physical operations that define circuit patterns on polymers, ceramic and silicon substrates and associated component assembly processes. In this paper we outline an environmental figure of merit for product and process designs that provides the designer the capability to assess the environmental compatibility of various product and process choices. A brief discussion of the PC-based tool, its architecture and a sample application in product and process design will be given.