Eco-performance evaluation of product designs–an integrated fuzzy complex proportional assessment with life cycle assessment

The growing public awareness has driven enterprises to develop environmentally friendly designs to fulfill customer satisfaction. Some eco-design tools have been introduced to designers to support greener product design and development qualitatively. However, most require qualitative judgement during the evaluation process. Although life cycle assessment (LCA) helps quantify a product system’s environmental loads, it requires much time and resources for data collection. Design selections are not preferred during the early product development stage, especially when the product development schedule is rather tight nowadays. This paper proposes a practical approach integrating a fast-track LCA, fuzzy-set, with COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS). This paper proposes an approach by incorporating the fuzzy-set, COPRAS, and LCA for decision-makers to evaluate design alternatives at the early product development stage. The originality of the paper is to provide an efficient approach to evaluating various design alternatives by quantifying their corresponding environmental burdens using LCA and fuzzy-set. Three distinct features can be found in the proposed generic approach. This study brings two contributions to the related field. For the area related to environmental impact assessment, this study illustrates the applicability of LCA in conjunction with COPRAS and fuzzy-set for the design alternative selection. Decision-makers can apply the proposed method that in-depth knowledge of environmental impact assessment is not essential, and the qualitative input required is minimal compared to a comprehensive LCA study.