Environmental assessment in the early stages of product design

Eco-design is an environmental approach that allows companies to use various tools to evaluate the product environmental impact during the design phase. However, the lack of information and high degree of uncertainty during the early design phases, hinder the use of this tools, such as life cycle assessment (LCA). To overcome this problem, we proposed a structured approach based on the environmental assessment of two main phases of the life cycle (raw material and manufacturing/assembly of the different components). For that we proposed two databases containing all necessary information about environmental impact of raw material and manufacturing processes in order to evaluate the environmental impact of the product from the preliminary stages of the design.