Developing an indicator setup to measure life-cycle conditions of electronic products

Abstract

The product-related assessment of progress towards crucial environmental aspects is important to steer the process of eco-innovation. Indicators must be simple and easy to apply, but they must give reliably information about the status and condition of a system to the involved stakeholders. Indicators must hence be selected aspects from a complex system. The forthcoming paper addresses this demands within the development of a product-specific indicator setup by means of the consideration of energy and resource efficiency as well as product quality. Today energy efficiency dominates in the product-related environmental protection. The result is that indicators address the energy consumption, in particular in the use phase, as the priority aspect in the consideration of the environmental impact of products. In a product the performance and lifetime should increase, whereas energy and resource consumption should decrease. A case study on LED lighting systems where chosen to empirically verify and show the application of the developed SERI - “Specific Energy and Resource Indicator”. Looking into detail, two LED lighting systems were compared by using the SERI. The comparison shows the possibilities of the indicator, but also the weaknesses.