Redesign methodology for developing environmentally conscious products

This paper presents a novel redesign approach that allows integrating environmental requirements into product development, taking into account cost and customer preferences. The proposed methodology allows the identification of environmental improvement options and the study of the effect that the incorporation of these options has over other traditional product requirements. However, for the incorporation of environmental improvements to be feasible from the company perspective, a market for environmentally friendly products must exist where customers are willing to pay for such products. The primary idea is to compare the increase that the incorporation of the environmental improvements produces on the life cycle cost of the product to the additional money that the customer is willing to pay for perceiving environmental benefits. The proposed approach is focused on establishing a relationship between quality function deployment (QFD), life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle cost (LCC) and contingent valuation (CV) techniques for evaluating customer, environmental and cost requirements and customer willingness-to-pay (WTP), respectively.