Introducing immediate Carbon Footprint assessment to computer aided product design

The purpose of this research was to introduce a computer environmental assessment tool into computer aided product design. A new computer tool “CFE (Carbon Footprint Evaluator)” was developed due to the “Carbon Emission” issue. The proposed tool can assist a designer to monitor his new developing parts or products. The designer can directly obtain the carbon footprint information of a part or a product through inputting several data about the “material”, “assembly”, “sale and use”, and “recycling and disposal”, and their corresponding transportation, during constructing his 3-D CAD model. Originally, the authors planned to collect Taiwanese LCA data and related carbon emission regulations, and then make the proposed tool specifically helpful to Taiwanese industry. Restricted within the less Taiwanese carbon emission data, however, most of data was temporarily taken from the ecoinvent Cnetre's ecoinvent data, Japanese LCA software “JEMAI-LCA Pro”, and Taiwanese government and academic research. Currently the proposed tool is still in improvement and development for function expansion.