scope:

Objective and role

With increasing prosperity, the consumption of natural resources also rises. This leads to some extent to criticism of conventional behavior, for example with regard to consumption or mobility. Politicians increasingly react with regulations and laws. Industry and science assume a key role in the development and implementation of future-proof solutions for an environmentally and socially compatible, that is to say sustainable, economy.

In order to assess and optimize the environmental compatibility of products and processes, efficient recycling, in the sense of renewed use or material recycling, constitutes only a part of the complex technological/ economic/ecological relationship. In the case of most comprehensive consideration and unified procedure, a large number of aspects and requirements have to be taken into account. However, priorities have to be set for pragmatic solutions, and company- specific and market-specific priorizations have to be applied.

The predominant part of the product properties and effects are defined by the designer with his design decisions in the course of the product development process. Only small details can still be influenced subsequently by means of specific measures in the production phase. The "recycling" design objective therefore has to be integrated into the development process from the start [1; 2].