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Design is described as the main factor influencing a product's sustainability, and with industrial growth, global interest in sustainability issues has also increased. Furthermore, the design process is an important part when companies are to reduce climate impact of their products, and that the demand for more environmentally friendly products is increasing. Due to both an expanded legal framework and increased consumer demand for green products, the concept of sustainable product development has been increasingly established and received greater attention. A method to determine the environmental impact of a product during its life cycle is to perform a life cycle assessment (LCA). However, conducting a LCA requires large amounts of information, information that can often be unreliable and difficult to obtain. For this reason, together with the fact that a LCA is both time-consuming and costly to carry out, there is reason to explore the possibilities for a simplified life cycle assessment (SLCA). The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a SLCA-tool could be created to support decision making in the product development process (PDP). Furthermore, the thesis intends to investigate how a SLCA-tool can be successfully integrated and used, and what role a SLCA-tool have in the PDP process. This tool creation will therefore contribute to more knowledge in the implementation of SLCA in manufacturing companies. A qualitative approach was used to address the aim of the paper. The methodology used was five-folded and included 1) preliminary study, 2) specification, 3) creation of tool, 4) verification of tool and 5) implementation. The creation of the tool was based on the conditions of a multinational company within the manufacturing sector. The results indicate that the user-friendliness of a SLCA-tool should be prioritized over the precision, on the basis that the tool should be used by designers with a mandate to make decisions about the design of a product. A SLCA-tool should therefore mainly focus on the raw material extraction and use phase, as these are the life cycle phases that generally have the highest climate impact, but it should also consider the other life cycle phases of a product. This reduces the number of choices the user has to make. To further help users make sustainability-related decisions in the PDP, a SLCA-tool should help them compare the environmental impact of different design options. Despite the gross simplifications, the evaluation of the developed SLCA-tool shows that the distribution of climate impact between the life cycle phases can largely be the same in a SLCA-tool as in a full scale LCA. By setting sustainability objectives early in the PDP and engaging an early integration of a SLCA-tool, even if the information about the product is initially limited, sustainability can be concretized and become a design parameter like time to market and cost. Through the early integration into the PDP, a SLCA-tool can also be used in a business context in Product Portfolio Management to ultimately develop a sustainable technology portfolio that meets customer needs. The creation of a SLCA-tool, based on company-specific conditions, gives hope for successful implementation and use, but the tool should also be evaluated after a period of implementation to determine its final effect on decision-making in the PDP. What is also important to consider is that the tool developed in this thesis only takes into account the climate impact, and thus a system perspective should be applied by complementing other ecodesign tools to avoid sub-optimization in decision-making. Furthermore, it should also be kept in mind that the main purpose of a SLCA is to map a product's climate impact and understand how resources can be allocated to reduce the climate impact of a product. If there is an awareness of these conditions, a SLCA-tool can both reduce cost and time, compared to a full scale LCA, to support decision-making in the PDP from a climate perspective. |
