Combining Five Criteria to Identify Relevant Products Measures for Resource Efficiency of an Energy Using Product

Abstract

Product recovery at end-of-life (EoL), initially focusing on the reduction of residual (hazardous) waste, is currently being enlarged and now link with emerging issues such as “resource efficiency” and “use and management of Critical Raw Materials”. However, for many environmental aspects, product’s measures considered by current policies and industry practices are not always consistent, nor optimized. It can be concluded that there is currently no systematic and consistent integration of EoL and resource efficiency measures in product design practices and in product policies and this should be improved. The paper proposes a new integrated method to assess the resource efficiency performances of products and to derive relevant product’s measures for improvement. The assessment is based on five different criteria: reusability/recyclability/recoverability - RRR - (per mass and per environmental impacts); recycled content (per mass and per environmental impact); use and management of hazardous substances. The paper briefly describes the assessments methods proposed for each of these criteria. The methods are based on existing literature and technical documents, and have been adapted to this particular aim. The proposed method is presented and discussed on the basis of a Energy using Product (EuP) case-study: a LCD-TV.