Date Available

12-7-2011

Year of Publication

2005

Document Type

Thesis

College

Engineering

Department

Manufacturing Systems Engineering

First Advisor

I. S. Jawahir

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and generate quantifiable measures of sustainability elements that apply to manufactured products in terms of environmental, social and economic benefits. This paper presents a new comprehensive methodology for sustainability evaluation of a new product at the design and development stage focusing on consumer electronics products through a Sustainability Scoring method. A new product is evaluated for its integral elemental and the overall sustainability contents impacting the product when it reaches the end-of-life by considering the entire life-cycle including the effective residual use of recovered materials in the subsequent life-cycles of the same or different products. This procedure can also be used by design engineers to assess a given product in comparison with a similar product, such as a prior or a subsequent model, or one from a competitor. The proposed six major integral sustainable elements are: products environmental impact, societal impact, functionality, resource utilization and economy, manufacturability and recyclability/remanufacturability. Each of these elements has corresponding sub-elements and influencing factors which are categorized using appropriate weighting factors according to their relative importance to the product.

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