Title: Disassembly-oriented ecodesign and case studies

Authors: Sara Copetti Klohn, Ney Francisco Ferreira

Addresses: Departamento de Engenharia Mecanica, Escola de Engenharia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, R. Sarmento Leite 425 – GPFAI Centro, 90050170 – Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil. ' Departamento de Engenharia Mecanica, Escola de Engenharia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, R. Sarmento Leite 425 – GPFAI Centro, 90050170 – Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil

Abstract: Current manufactured products are not always designed to fulfil ecological requirements. Products should be easy to dismantle in order to separate all materials so they can be reused, recovered or recycled. In most products, however, the junctions utilised are tightly joined, making it difficult to disassemble them. In order to contribute to the designers| work in developing easily-to-disassembly products, three pre-recycling centres were visited and observed; two coffee machines were disassembled and examined. Both procedures were intended to provide examples of the various difficulties currently encountered in a common disassembly process, so that such hindrances can be avoided with new products. It was concluded that designers and engineers should do this type of study to learn about the most serious problems of existing products with respect to their disassembly processes and about how to correct them, as was observed in our experiments.

Keywords: design engineering; design for disassembly; DFD; case studies; product design; product recycling; product reuse; product recovery; life cycle design; ecodesign; sustainability; sustainable development.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDE.2009.028447

International Journal of Design Engineering, 2009 Vol.2 No.1, pp.80 - 96

Published online: 17 Sep 2009 *

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