LCA Based Design for Environment in the Automotive Industry

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.