Evaluation of environmentally conscious product designs

Design-For-Retirement is a concept that allows one to design a product such that its retirement time and post-life treatment are optimized, i.e., its environmental impact is minimized and financial gain is maximized. Retired products face four primary multi-lifecycle engineering treatments: 1) to recondition for reuse in the next lifecycle; 2) to convert into a material form for recycling back into new parts, 3) to disassemble into several components for further assessment, and 4) to landfill. Each option has a different environmental cost-benefit ratio. This paper proposes several matrices to represent the connection information, interference directions among nodes, and disassembly complexity. It presents a method to evaluate a design in terms of cost and apply it to two personal computer designs.