A modular eco-design method for life cycle engineering based on redesign risk control.

This paper proposed a modular eco-design method for life cycle engineering of electronic and electricity equipment (EEE). This method can help designers improve the maintainability, reusability and recyclability of EEE. Using modular method for eco-design is not a new idea. But most former methods have two common problems. For many researches including our research, modular method is used as a redesign method to improve the environmental attributes of their products. In redesign process, the configuration or some components of the original product will be changed. These changes will bring two very serious problems wherein how to ensure the original main functions can be satisfied and the new assembly can be realized. Most of the former researches used an empirical method to analyze their redesign result to show that their redesign process works. To theoretically solve these problems by a risk control method is the most important contribution of this paper. We introduced functional and physical risk assessment as two constraints of redesign optimization process. With these two constraints, designers can control the redesign risk to an acceptable value. We believe that this method can be used not only for our modular eco-design but also for other redesign methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]