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A new generation of instrument panels will be characterized by a single material design. In the design process, more and more attention is directed to the life cycle steps after the usage phase of parts, products or systems. For this reason, the aim of every designer should be the development of a recyclable part, product or system. The request for the development should not only be recyclability, but also economic efficiency as well as low environmental impact during production and usage phase. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for the development and design process to obtain an optimized economic and ecological (low environmental impact during the whole life cycle) product. A methodology, how Life Cycle Assessment could be integrated into the development and design process for parts, products and systems, will be presented.

This paper will present the modeling of electronic products with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), especially for appliances in cars. The so called Generic Module based LCA enables the user to model nearly every electronic products, each relating to their respective manufacturing phases. A short introduction to the method will be underlined by several examples. From the co-operation with industry partners outcomes of multi-client studies will be shown. The LCA results of electronic car appliances (combined sensors and actuators) take into consideration the manufacturing phase, the use phase according to interactions between the electronic systems and the car’s use phase and finally the assessment of an End of Life (EoL) alternative for the appliance.

This paper gives an overview on the potentials of NEFLEET (New Electrical Fleet), the first fuel cell (FC) bus fleet to be operated on public roads in 10 European cities. The department of Life Cycle Engineering of IKP, University of Stuttgart and PE will perform a life cycle analysis of this new propulsion technology together with the needed infrastructure and possible hydrogen production routes. This includes a comparison to existing bus based transportation systems such as diesel busses, CNG and trolley busses.

Life cycle assessment offers a suitable methodology to evaluate environmental impacts over the total life cycle of the car. Indeed the effort for LCA studies of complex products like cars is very high. Design for environment tools can help to reduce the effort for environmental evaluation because of their direct integration in the designers workflow. As DFE is not standardized, it should be based on the reliable data from LCA. A connection between LCA and DFE offers the possibility to integrate environmental evaluation with tolerable effort directly in the design process while keeping the transparency and reliability of LCA.