Disassembly factors of products: material links and products shape

With the development of technological innovation, the replacement rate of products has increased, lifecycles of products have shortened, and then consumers' selective has surged. The global environmental problem which caused by large amount of waste products deserves our deep study and improvement. Thus, companies need to focus on environmental responsibility while designers have obligation to change strategies of product design to achieve both environmental protection and sustainable purposes. However, the current research on product recycling limits to its process management and the use of non-toxic materials. There is no specific study on designing product structures to speed up the disassembling for recycling materials and improve the efficiency of recycling. To achieve the above purposes, this study has two stages of experiments; first stage is for understanding how designers design product structure under the disassembling restriction while the second stage applies methodology to improve the design process for recycling. Through experiment, observation, trial, and validation, this paper proposes a new methodology for efficiently disassembling waste products. However, this method just helps designers, at the early stage of product design process, to understand the product structure or the relationships between parts. And these relationships directly affect the appearance of a product. Therefore, in design and production processes, designers and engineers must thoroughly consider how the parts of a product should be linked without affecting its functional performance. For example, combine parts of the same material while separate parts of different materials. In this way, it is able to not only increase recycling efficiency but also reduce numbers of parts to achieve the purposes of sustainable design.