How do you successfully eco-design your product?

The 4 keys to eco-design

We live in a finite world, with increasingly limited resources. The choice to create a new product is therefore a responsibility for the marketer; an ecological and social responsibility.

As a specialist in eco-design and a manufacturer of electronic products, Altyor gives you the 4 keys to entering the era of eco-responsibility!

Key 01: Integrate eco-design levers

You’ve got your product concept, you’ve drawn up your specifications with all your requirements. Now it’s time to add a chapter on your eco-design requirements.

Here are a few key tips that you can either add to your specifications for your industrial product, or for your V2 with the aim of reducing the environmental footprint of your product:

Wanting a repairable product
This requires intelligent design. To achieve this, your product needs to be easy to dismantle: a well-sized clip system, avoiding glue or ultrasonic welding, will allow easy access to the product’s interior for maintenance or refurbishment. For a connected product, it’s vital to think about how to update your firmware to prevent it from becoming obsolete and for easier repair. Remote is best, by radio or close by.

Wanting a product that lasts
Since most of a product’s environmental impact comes from its manufacture, it’s vital to be able to offer products that users will be able to keep for as long as possible. It’s your manufacturer’s job to guarantee this. But pay close attention to this point. At Altyor, our qualification laboratory is in-house, which enables us to validate the number of cycles of a button press, the operating capacity in the face of shocks of X joules… We also calculate the MTBF, i.e. the reliability of electronic boards.
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Wanting a product that consumes as little as possible
There are many ways of achieving this. It’s the role of your electronics design office to optimize your product’s power consumption. This may involve choosing a low-consumption technology, thinking about the information feedback (if it goes up too often, the product will consume more; so it should only go up when necessary), or the choice of power supply. The holy grail: can you use alternative, clean technological solutions (solar or mechanical energy recovery modules)?
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Wanting a desire for sobriety in both the product and its packaging
Think about the thickness of your product, all the non-essential elements in your packaging… All the little things that will really help to reduce the impact of your product. Your mechanical design office specialized in eco-design will be a source of suggestions. Finally, have you considered the use of recycled materials? Often a source of prejudice, they are nevertheless of great ecological interest.

Key 02: Build your business model

As you saw in point 1, there are many eco-design levers which are vital to introduce as early as possible in your design process. However, the value of eco-design is maximized when it enables you to reduce the environmental footprint of your product. What do you want your product to become when it’s no longer used by your customer, when your V2 is available, if it’s broken or if it’s a generational product?

Of course, most electronic products go to WEEE subsidiaries, but connected products are so new that these channels are not yet organized. This makes your role as a marketer all the more important. To have a real impact, you need to think about how to recover your product at the end of its life cycle, in order to repair it or recycle its materials.

Altyor has created two loops in France for its customers: a Refurbishing loop and a Recycling loop in response to this problem. Like the start-up Bookinou, you need to think about your business model. And you need to do it first. How are you going to get your products back? By creating a reward for your customers in return for product returned. By creating a monthly subscription so that your added value is in the service and no longer in the product, so that it can be delivered and updated easily, like box operators. Another model exists, that of the Linky box or urban scooters, where you remain the owner of your product, giving you easy access to it. It’s up to you to think about your specific use case. Our Design for Tomorrow department can help you with your thinking. But thinking about it is the 1st step.

Key 03: Perform a life cycle assessment

Why should you carry out a life cycle analysis of your product?
Quite simply because it’s the ideal tool for verifying the impact of your design decisions and making new ones. In fact, a life cycle assessment or LCA performs an environmental diagnosis of your product based on several indicators (global warming, depletion of natural resources, water consumption, etc.) and studies different scenarios. These scenarios can be used to verify the impact of changes in material type (recycled, percentage of recycled material, etc.), process changes, or the creation of a circular economy scheme.

“LCA is a tool that requires special expertise, both for analysis and for the search for solutions. It breaks down preconceived ideas to produce an objective analysis that is genuinely effective in terms of action.” Bastien Spinella, Design for Tomorrow Manager

Key 04: Calculate your eco-responsibility index

Created by Altyor, the Design for Tomorrow scoring is our preferred tool for assessing a product’s level of eco-design. While LCA enables us to identify the levers that will improve a product’s environmental impact, the index will assess the product’s progress towards eco-responsibility. Thanks to its expertise, Altyor has created a benchmark based on 4 categories that bring together all the Design for Tomorrow technological bricks. The indices to be reached are obviously Excellence and Maturity. But each index allows the customer to become aware of the status of his product and the scope for improvement.

“The Design for Tomorrow index was our response to the repairability index, which did not suit the type of product we manufacture for our customers. It’s a metronome for our customers and a mirror of all the eco-design efforts we’ve made.” Yanis Cottard, President of Altyor

Altyor, from eco-design to industrial production of smart devices

Altyor designs and manufactures smart devices for its customers, from start-ups to major accounts. All this, the SME does with an eco-responsible approach called Design for Tomorrow. Since May 2022, Altyor has expanded its production unit in France, with production lines for small and medium production runs for its customers. It joined the Hardware France association in June 2022.