Structuring Ecological Indicators in Machinery and Plant Engineering for Product Development

A necessary precondition for a sustainability transformation is creating transparency about the environmental impact of products along their entire life cycle. However, possibilities for influencing sustainability are not directly apparent for product development using existing ecology metrics or methodologies such as Life Cycle Assessment, especially when dealing with complex machines and plants. This is a major challenge because up to 80% of a product’s environmental impact is defined during development. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology for structuring and selecting ecological indicators for the sustainability assessment of products within product development. Thus, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify relevant ecological indicators and elaborate a generic ecology structure. Simultaneously, the life cycle of machines and plants was analyzed and a generic process structure was developed to describe it from product development’s perspective. By identifying the relationships between processes and ecological indicators, a product-specific selection of indicators is made possible.