Eco-architecture analysis as a method of end-of-life decision making for sustainable product design

In recent years, sustainable product design has become a great concern to product manufacturers. An effective way to enhance the product sustainability is to design products that are easy to disassemble and recycle. An EOL strategy is concerned with how to disassemble a product and what to do with each of the resulting disassembled parts. A sound understanding of the EOL strategy from the early design stage could improve the ease of disassembly and recycling in an efficient and effective manner. We introduce a novel concept of eco-architecture which represents a scheme by which the physical components are allocated to EOL modules. An EOL module is a physical chunk of connected components or a feasible subassembly which can be simultaneously processed by the same EOL option without further disassembly. In this paper, a method for analyzing and optimizing the eco-architecture of a product in the architecture design stage is proposed. Using mathematical programming, it produces an optimal eco-architecture based on the estimation of the economic values and costs for possible EOL modules under the given environmental regulations.