Product Design Strategies for Decarbonization and Resource Efficiency

The environmental impact of products is highly dependent on decisions made during product design. Like other performance attributes, design for environment requires balancing tensions related to resource efficiency, reliability, repairability and other factors. The importance of quantitatively evaluating these tensions has grown, in order to guide design decisions toward optimizing for minimum environmental impact over the full lifecycle. This paper presents how lifecycle assessment can be leveraged to evaluate these tensions. Two case studies are presented. The first focuses on optimizing the design of laptop computer displays to balance resource efficiency with repairability. The second focuses on selecting the optimal computer memory architecture to balance resource efficiency with repairability and upgradability. Both case studies demonstrate that it is simplistic to assume, in isolation, that designing for repairability and upgradability always lead to lower environmental impacts. Nuanced, quantitative assessments are required to optimize for environmental impacts over the full lifecycle of a product.