Product life cycles, green design

Quality is one of the distinction strategies that create prestige for manufacturers. High focus on environmental consideration in design phase must not lead to disregard customer expectation. Cristopher et al. (1996) developed Green QFD which utilizes the integration of the product life cycle and environmental considerations. 

Green product design is about reviewing the entire life-cycle of a product or service from sourcing all the raw materials needed, to ultimate disposal at the end of life. Looking for opportimities to improve performance, reduce costs and reduce environmental impact. 

The whole topic of Life Cycle Assessment is dealt with in detail in Chapter 7. However, there are some important points about LCA as it relates to green product design. It is important to be able to compare different solutions, it is also important to be aware of the limitations of LCA. These include ... 

The main purpose of life-cycle data in green product design is to help select attractive opportunities for further development. LCA is not an end in itself, only a guide to decision making. So the advice attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes is relevant it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong . 

There are many ways you can prime the search for innovation opportunities in green product design. Two with a proven track record are described in detail below the life-cycle profile and the eco-innovation compass. 

The percentage of the overall impact allocated to each stage of the life-cycle can then be displayed as a simple bar chart. This allows attention to be focused on the stage with maximum environmental impact, where green product design will have most effect. 

The development of green Foodomics runs parallel to the improvement and design of techniques able to assess the environmental impact of the different protocols/processes/operations involved. At present several techniques can be found in the literature to test, for instance, the impact of analytical chemistry methods (such as the Greeness profile, the HPLC-EAT, or the Analytical Eco-Scale) and the environmental impacts associated with a product or process, over its entire life cycle (such as Life Cycle Assessment). Nevertheless, techniques able to provide a more holistic view of the different aspects... 

There has been active work in the development of processes that are safer and have less potentially damaging environmental impacts. These environmentally benign or green process designs typically include a life-cycle analysis to account for the long-term environmental (and economic) impact of a product or design. 

The environmental issues are providing an exciting opportunity for R D to make a significant contribution, not only to the health of the local community but also the financial health of the company. Some of the major areas for study by R D are catalytic solutions, solvent replacement, novel reactors, such as microreactors, as well as considering the product design carrying out life cycle assessments and the use of alternative feedstocks. This area has become known as Green Chemistry [D-6]. 

Mass index (MI) is defined as the total mass used in a process/process step divided by the mass of product and it is approximately the E-factor plus one. A software package, the Environmental Assessment Tool for Organic Syntheses (EATOS), has been designed to calculate some of these metrics. More elaborate assessments such as life cycle assessment (LCA), could be performed, but this is also beyond the scope of this chapter. Our objective is to provide a preliminary assessment for the community to determine if further development of any guanidine organocatalysis is appropriate for use in green chemistry. 

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