Development of product design requirements using taxonomies of environmental issues

In this paper, we develop and apply three approaches for preparing taxonomies that assist in gathering, storing, using, and reusing Design for Environment requirements. The first taxonomy broadly captures environmental concerns as product attributes within a taxonomy of manufacturing issues. The second taxonomy classifies environmental concerns into health and safety, environmental, and societal issues within a taxonomy of manufacturing. The third taxonomy classifies environmental management actions into health and safety protection, resource conservation, pollution prevention, and economic and social welfare preservation as a corporate requirement. We find that classifying environmental issues as environmental concerns or management actions improves the comprehensiveness, objectivity, validity, and enhancement of understanding and prediction of the taxonomy and the resulting design requirements and engineering characteristics. Also, classification of environmental issues is found to be time and resource consumptive and would benefit from future work on archiving this information (using database/Expert systems) to reduce the immediate engineering workload without loss of detail.