The construction of a collaborative framework in support of low carbon product design

Ideally, carbon information could be disclosed and reduced through the supply chain if a life cycle inventory is well conducted. However, in practice, it has been found through the observation of the past carbon footprint inventories of enterprises that owing to the limited cost and resources, most of these investigations were seldom comprehensively conducted and were not integrated with the existing internal management systems or information systems of the enterprises, but instead were conducted as a special project for target products. Also, most enterprises thought it was time-consuming to conduct these inventories (raw material suppliers, manufacturers, transporters, retailers, customers, and waste processors, numerous suppliers). The main purpose of this study is to construct a collaborative design framework to help enterprises collect and calculate products' carbon footprints in a readily and timely manner throughout the entire supply chain. In this research, a computer aided tool was used to integrate enterprises' internal systems with life cycle inventory database and to establish enterprises' GHGs bills of material system. These enterprises were provided with standard data collection forms and a search engine system based on life cycle assessment approaches. A case study on the implementation of the system is also illustrated.