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Sustainable & Circular Product Design Course - Course & Test
Comprehensive evaluation and reduction of a products environmental footprint throughout its life cycle in design and engineering.
A product’s environmental footprint extends across its entire life, not only its manufacturing stage, and evaluating and reducing that full footprint is the skill this course builds. It opens with Life Cycle Assessment applied specifically to product design, compares it against Product Carbon Footprint methodology, and moves through the product life cycle design phases, thermoplastic versus thermoset selection from a recyclability standpoint, design for disassembly under right-to-repair rules, and material-specific cases, magnet-based assembly and sodium polyacrylate among them, that show a sustainability constraint changing a real design decision.
Regulatory pressure on product sustainability has moved from a voluntary marketing claim to a mandatory compliance requirement across most export markets, which makes this course relevant to any engineer designing a product sold internationally. It serves product developers who must answer a customer’s or regulator’s sustainability questionnaire with real data rather than a marketing statement, and manufacturers who need to redesign a product line to remain compliant with tightening producer responsibility rules. TRIZ appears again here because several of its inventive principles map directly onto resource reduction and dematerialization strategies.
The Concepts & Tools to Learn in this Course:
These are the bodies of knowledge that will be assessed in the test below:
Life Cycle Assessment in product design
Life Cycle Assessment versus Product Carbon Footprint comparison
Product life cycle design phases
Thermoplastics versus thermosets from a recyclability standpoint
Design for disassembly under right-to-repair rules
Magnet-based design as a disassembly-friendly technique
Packaging film design as a sustainability case
Sodium polyacrylate applications and material innovation
Form follows function applied to material reduction
TRIZ inventive principles applied to dematerialization
ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 life cycle assessment standards
Carbon footprint calculation methodology and emission factors
Circular economy business models: product as a service, take-back schemes
Eco-material selection databases and certifications
Packaging sustainability and material reduction
Sustainability reporting and Digital Product Passport requirements
Our Suggested Readings
The list below is a special selection of our original articles, tools and methodologies available on this site.
Tip: the big dot at the start of each title indicates if that post/article has already been read ( ● ), or not ( ○ ). Refresh the page if necessary.
Tip: the reading progress is recorded either in a cookie (if you are not logged in or no account created), or in your site profile. Use the later to be sure not to loose your progression.
As soon as you start a given article, your progress will be indicated on top of each page to help you finish and move on to the next.
Note: for this particular course, articles can be read in any order.
After you are familiar with the lectures above, so as having done your own readings, we recommend attending the Exam below.
The test consists of 20 questions in random order, out of many more, to insure novelty each time. Each completely correct answer gets you 10 points. You get a full correction at the end of the test.
If the course has different levels, the current test does not include questions of lower levels, making it … hardthat level!
radio-buttons: only 1 correct answer must be selected
check-boxes: 1 or several answers must be checked (with strict all-good-or-nothing grading logic)
Tip: mouse over “Hint” to get an advise for the response.
Only innovation.world members can see it below and attend it.
