Comparison of environmental performance between plastic and steel fuel tanks

Abstract Increasing awareness of environmental burdens has led companies and designers to initiate design for the environment (DFE) programmes, which consider the design of products from the ‘cradle to grave’ and is also known as ‘life-cycle design’. In this paper, the use of a novel environmental performance technique to be used at the early stage of product design is presented. This technique, which is to be used as a framework for green product design, is demonstrated in this paper by evaluating the environmental performance between plastic and steel fuel tanks. The fuel tank comparison can be divided into five steps. In the first four steps, a modified house of quality (HOQ) is used to analyse the performance of fuel tanks in terms of requirements of environmentally conscious design. The final step is an overall assessment that synthesizes the results from the previous four analyses. As a result, the comprehensive environmental effects in the whole life cycle of fuel tanks are captured in the early stage of design.