Enhancing the environmental sustainability of product through ecodesign: a systematic review

To limit global warming to within 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the incorporation of environmental considerations into the design of products – also known as ecodesign, has been identified as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Decisions in the design stage often have the most impact in affecting attributes of a product such as the product’s environmental sustainability. Although the impacts and benefits are obvious, the development of environmentally sustainable products is often avoided due to a lack of trained designers. Different tools have thus been developed to address this deficiency. In this paper, we review ecodesign tools developed to aid designers in product design. Through a systematic literature review, 141 articles were assessed and grouped into design generation, assessment, and selection. The goal of the review is to identify existing ecodesign tools in the literature, find out how these tools help designers to lower the environmental impact of their designs, and the limitations of existing tools. Finally, we propose an ecodesign system comprising 10 modules.