A review of ecodesign and environmental assessment tools and their appropriateness for electrical and electronic equipment

Toward an systemic navigation framework to integrate sustainable development into the company

“…To aid comprehension, environmental or green strategies should be carefully and reasonably broken down into several actions (Hallstedt et al, 2010). For some environmental actions, like entire life-cycle analysis, avoidance of hazardous materials and the environmental performance declaration, a vast range of environmental methods and related tools has been developed (Baumann et al, 2002;Brezet and Van hemel, 1997;Unger et al, 2008;Siegenthaler et al, 2005;Hallstedt et al, 2010). Nevertheless, in practice, the required competences and resources of each set of methods and tools are never uniform.…”

“…2.2.1. The engineering evaluation of environmental methods and tools Unger et al (2008) claimed that there is no uniform solution to selecting environmental methods and tools. Some criteria and evaluating characteristics have been indicated.…”

“…The Integrated Environmental Management System, published by US Environment Protection Agency (EPA), emphasizes that in the current corporate context, factors such as implementing cost, required time and competences need to be considered. Unger et al, (2008);Pardo, 2011) synthesized these characteristics as a "complexity" indicator for selection.…”

“…Wagner (2007) identified a lack of prioritization of supports for defining the sustainable aspects of each context and selecting suitable actions. Unger et al (2008) highlighted the need to consider some operational indicators, such as real complexity, operational period, resource availability and current cultural context. In previous research, (Zhang, 2011) focused on the fact that the evaluation mechanism may prioritize environmental methods and tools by the gap between the method's needs and the current context of the resource.…”

“…This mechanism could therefore ensure a dynamic evaluation through corporate development. However Unger et al (2008) did not present any solution for the integration of these dynamic factors as regards the project context, and (Zhang, 2011) only noted a global framework, without the details of the score judgment and use scenarios.…”