Cradle-to-Customer Life Cycle Assessment for environmental conscious operations and product development: Case study of two precision instruments

New emerging regulations and market rivalry has forced electronic manufacturers to assess their environmental impacts in order to decrease their environmental burden. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method has been used widely in industry to assess the product scale environmental impacts in order to enhance the environmentally conscious product design and product planning. However, the LCAs including product specific data collection can be resource extensive due to the complexity of electronic systems, which hinders the usability of LCA in the dynamic product planning process. This paper aims to present the main findings and challenges of an LCA of small-sized electronic products through a case study. Furthermore, the usability of LCA as a tool for eco-design is discussed. The LCA method was applied for two electronic products with the scope bounded to the cradle-to-customer phases through the life cycle. Due to the complexity of the products' end-of-life system and limited time for the study quantitative assessment of end-of-life was left with less attention in LCA. However, during the LCA process the end-of-life aspects of the case study products were studied separately on a qualitative basis.