Ecodesign tool for SMEs in the electronics sector

The electronics sector is one of the fastest developing industry branches. Rapidly changing product systems and components are a challenge for producers and designers to create ecodesign suitable electronic products. Therefore a fast and flexible tool is needed to accomplish ecodesign on products and processes with reasonable effort. Due to the fact that ecodesign should reflect life cycle thinking (a consideration of only one stage of the life cycle might lead to a shifting of burdens), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a proper tool to fulfil these requirements. Since the European ecodesign directives (EuP/ErP) are extended to more and more applications including electronic components, electronic enterprises will be faced with an increasing demand to provide their customers information concerning the environmental profiles of their products. Bigger sized companies already implemented ecodesign procedures into the product development. However, most of the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford the required resources. Therefore, the ecodesign tool "EDEP" has been developed to support SMEs during the development process. Based on the method of LCA and by using generic modules, high quality results are generated in reasonable time and with reasonable personal resources without losing the required transparency and depth of detail for the identification of ecodesign measures.