Sustainable design through life cycle assessment and product lifecycle management integration

Abstract

Currently, the modern industrial manufacturing process is a significant contributor to overall levels of carbon emissions. To tackle this issue, there is a need for companies to overhaul their existing design process into a more sustainability-focused process. To do so, this report aims to introduce a framework that integrates existing Product Lifecycle Management tools with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools. This is done to allow for design engineers to obtain quantitative feedback on the sustainability performance of their designs, thereby enabling a sustainability-focused redesign process. As part of a continuation of previous work done by the sponsoring company, the introduction of a python-based LCA tool is proposed. This tool was developed as part of the proposed framework and would allow for the generation of LCA results from a product’s Bill of Material. The report concludes by performing a case study using wind turbines, and using LCA results, identifies hotspots as areas for redesign.