Life cycle assessment: why and how?
Bastien Spinella, manager of the Design for tomorrow program at Altyor, explains everything about life cycle assessment. First of all, can you explain what life…
Altyor eco-designs products for its customers thanks to
its two mechanical and electronic design offices.
Through this Eco-design Diagnostic, Altyor brings you this expertise to achieve three objectives:
In 12 weeks of mission, you will have in your hands concrete solutions to reduce the environmental footprint of your product.
In order to measure and analyze the environmental impact of your product, Altyor needs to collect all the elements that make up the product: electronic components, mechanical components, information related to packaging, transport flows, distribution, and elements related to the end-of-life treatment of each component. This inventory is the most important phase in continuing the diagnosis. In parallel with this phase, we will organize training for your teams and your management on the challenges of eco-design. You will thus develop skills around these subjects and the tools implemented during this diagnosis.
Altyor will model the life cycle analysis and evaluate the Design for Tomorrow Index of your current product. This work will make it possible to highlight the impact of your product by environmental indicator: depletion of the ozone layer, depletion of resources, climate change, etc. It will also highlight the phases that contribute the most to carbon: transport, manufacturing, end of life… the opportunity to put figures on reality and to deconstruct presupposed ideas. Based on these two assessments, our teams will be able to establish recommendations to improve your environmental footprint. At the end of this first mission, the pre-restitution will take place where you will be presented with the results and our proposals. You will therefore have to carry out a reflection: from which scenarios you would like to continue the Diag’ eco-design mission.
Based on the 2 or 3 alternative scenarios you have chosen, Altyor will remodel your life cycle analysis and your Design for Tomorrow index. During the final restitution, these results will be presented and explained to you. A final report will be sent to you, so you can make decisions based on quantified and measured comparisons and implement concrete actions to reduce the environmental footprint of your product.
On this graph, the distribution of environmental impacts according to the different sub-assemblies produced. It can be observed regarding the environmental indicator ‘Climate change’ (Climate change), the PCBA will have the greatest impact. Possible solutions could be to change certain electronic components or communication technologies. The life cycle analysis will give a detailed vision of the impact of each block and each component.
Here is the Design for Tomorrow rating of a second product. The worst score is at the level of the Packaging block (excluding the Bonus block). The product obtains 5 out of 15. The recommendations could be the elimination of non-essential elements, for example.
Life cycle assessment is the starting point for understanding the environmental impact of your product. To understand the ins and outs of what is known as LCA (life cycle assessment), we have put together 14 answers that will shed some light.
Bastien Spinella, manager of the Design for tomorrow program at Altyor, explains everything about life cycle assessment. First of all, can you explain what life…