How can you integrate life cycle aspects into the design phase and thus improve the environmental performance of your product?

Design for Environment (DfE)

DfE or Ecodesign are methods supporting product developers in reducing the total environmental impact of a product early in the product development process. This includes reducing resource consumption as well as emissions and waste. New EU directives such as EuP, WEEE and RoHS refer to the concept of Ecodesign. A sound life cycle based Ecodesign can potentially enable to provide reliable decision support at a largely reduced effort for performing the study.

Design for Recycling (DfR)

... implies the following requirements of a product: easy to dismantle, easy to obtain 'clean' material-fractions that can be recycled (e.g. iron and copper should be easy to separate), easy to remove parts/components that must be treated separately, use as few different materials as possible, mark the materials/polymers in order to sort them correctly, avoid surface treatment in order to keep the materials 'clean'. Doing so you may prepare your product for e.g. the WEEE and RoHS directives.

Training courses

To keep you updated you should consider to frequently attend training courses, workshops etc. held by the leading experts.