Sustainability assessment methodology in product design: a review and directions for future research

Abstract

To achieve sustainable product design, it is crucial to use sustainability assessment during the product design process. In this paper, numerous sustainability assessment methodologies in product design are reviewed. A comprehensive assessment of sustainability has been reported to present better performance for improving product sustainability. This review focused on the consideration of sustainability elements by previous researchers that have proposed integrated design tools, commercial software tools and combination both methods in supporting the methodologies. Based on this review, it can be concluded that the inclusion of sustainability performance among the assessment criteria in the design process activities is suggested as a critical point of concern which presents a challenge and is a great opportunity to develop useful guidelines or directions for industries or any product-based project so that the proposed approach will be accepted for implementation in the working environment.