Redesign methodology for developing environmentally conscious products

Abstract

This paper presents a novel redesign approach that allows integrating environmental requirements into product development, taking into account cost and customer preferences. The proposed methodology allows the identification of environmental improvement options and the study of the effect that the incorporation of these options has over other traditional product requirements. However, for the incorporation of environmental improvements to be feasible from the company perspective, a market for environmentally friendly products must exist where customers are willing to pay for such products. The primary idea is to compare the increase that the incorporation of the environmental improvements produces on the life cycle cost of the product to the additional money that the customer is willing to pay for perceiving environmental benefits. The proposed approach is focused on establishing a relationship between quality function deployment (QFD), life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle cost (LCC) and contingent valuation (CV) techniques for evaluating customer, environmental and cost requirements and customer willingness-to-pay (WTP), respectively.

Keywords:

• Life cycle assessment (LCA)
• Life cycle cost (LCC)
• Willingness-to-pay (WTP)
• Voice of the customer (VoC)
• Design methodology
• Environmental product design

Acknowledgments

Partial support of this work by a grant from the Fundació Caixa Castelló-Bancaixa of Spain is gratefully acknowledged.