JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #63 - March 2011 - 40

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The"Pôle Eco-conception et Management du Cycle de Vie" ("Eco-Design and Life Cycle Management Hub") is an association of manufacturers whose objective is to develop, promote and disseminate best practices in product development, integrating environmental and societal aspects throughout the life cycle of products and services.

Principles of eco-design (environmental impacts, life cycle)
Eco-design is first and foremost a design approach, and is therefore initiated by the design office in charge of designing a new product. In the traditional development processes, still the most common today, the key parameters of concern to project managers are the observance of deadlines, product performance, industrial feasibility, costs and risk management. The eco-design approach consists, in principle, in factoring the environment into the monitoring of the usual design indicators. Here is how: Eco-design is based on two fundamental principles: the "life cycle" approach and the "multiple criteria" approach. - The "life cycle" approach to a product consists in taking into account all the stages characterising the product from manufacture through use to disposal. This approach is also called "from cradle to grave": its interest lies in providing a general view of the issues at stake in order to ensure that certain major environmental impacts are not overlooked. The life cycle of a product or service can generally be broken

down into five stages: raw materials, manufacture, distribution, use and endof-life. Each of these stages involves processes requiring inflows (raw materials, energy) and generating outflows (liquid and solid waste into the water, air and soil). These stages give rise to environmental impacts that vary in type and intensity. - The multiple criteria approach consists in considering, for each stage of the life cycle, all of the environmental impacts generated by the product. There are a large number of environmental impact categories, the best known being global warming, toxicity, the depletion of resources such as water and raw materials, along with energy resources, damage to the ozone layer, aquatic ecotoxicity, photochemical oxidation, eutrophication and acidification. The list is not exhaustive. These impacts are directly associated with the flows of incoming and outgoing materials and energy for each of the stages of the life cycle of a product or service. The difficulty in identifying the environmental impacts of a product comes from the time and space scales that characterise them. Such impacts may therefore be expressed on a local, national or global scale, and over the short, medium or long term (Fig.1). The interest of this dual "life cycle" and "multiple criteria" approach is that it avoids the "transfer of impacts" when carrying out an environmental redesign of an existing product, the risk being that if the project manager were to concentrate on reducing the impacts of a single stage of the product life cycle, he might just end up "offloading" the

However, taking account of the environmental impacts generated by an industrial site, despite being necessary, does not appear of itself sufficient when considering the impact at the scale of a particular product, that will pass through several sites, and especially industrial sites, during its lifecycle. The "product"-based environmental approach, in other words taking account of and restricting the environmental impacts of a product at every stage of its life cycle, is designated by the term "eco-design". This distinction makes it possible to appreciate the complementary nature of the "product" and "site"-based environmental approaches.

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jec composites magazine / No63 March 2011

Fig.1: Flowchart of the life cycle and inflow/outflow impacts (Pôle Eco-conception )
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #63 - March 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #63 - March 2011
