Towards Sustainable Product Design

The aim of this paper is to propose a framework to guide engineers’ use of LCA tools to optimize three important stages of a product’s life cycle. The three phases are product concept design, manufacturing process and products end of life recycle. A mountain bike has been used as an example to demonstrate how engineers are guided by the proposed framework. The proposed framework does not only lead industry in a sustainable design direction but also guide them to embed sustainable thinking into every stage of a product life cycle based on their existing resources. Some design tools and techniques have been incorporated with life cycle assessment tools to achieve the sustainable optimization of the products.