Environmental conscious design: An introduction to EDST

Industrial companies are facing more pressure to improve the recyclability performance of their new designed products. The concept of Environmental Conscious Design (ECD) has been adopted to assist more concerning about the environmental impact of the products at the early stage of designing. This new trend requires that the design strategy should be modified to integrate environmental constraints. This paper develops an Environmental Design Support Tool (EDST) to help designers improve their product in aspect of the environment. The proposed EDST is capable of evaluating the new designed product in terms of environmental sustainability, i.e., material selection, recyclability evaluation, and disassemblability analyses.