Life Cycle Assessment of a Mobile Tiny House Made with Sustainable Materials and Design Implications

Design issues concerning circular economy assessment methods at the product level: a comparative analysis through a case study of a mobile tiny house

“…The metric developed to assess the combination of circularity, novelty and concepts was developed by Ruiz-Pastor et al 2022 and designated as CN_Con. It evaluates the circularity and the novelty as a whole in product concepts.…”

“…However, there are several methods with this purpose, for example, the ones mentioned in Cardoso Chrispim et al . (2023), Ruiz-Pastor et al (2022), Parchomenko et al (2019), Saidani et al (2019), and Bovea and Pérez-Belis (2012). Cardoso Chrispim et al .…”

“…Other works in the same line are Morkunaite et al (2021), Lonca et al (2020) or Bressanelli et al (2019). Several of these works also apply the assessment methods through different case studies (Boer et al 2020; Lonca et al 2020; Minunno et al 2020; Ruiz-Pastor et al 2022). These studies overall converge on the lack of a standard method, which is often cited as one of the most severe limitations for CE assessment.…”

“…As materials are a primary concern in CE (e.g., Hallstedt et al 2023), designers have to identify, among the others, the most suitable combination of materials in terms of performance, costs and sustainability (Ruiz-Pastor et al 2023). This optimal combination is still challenging, especially in the building industry.…”

“…Particularly diffused are natural materials such as hemp or wood, which are supposed to have no negative effect on the performance of the designed products (Galimshina et al 2022). To test the environmental quality of these materials and other innovative building techniques, a common approach is to analyze buildings and houses through LCA (Arrigoni et al 2017; Cabeza et al 2014; Ruiz-Pastor et al 2023). While the application of LCA follows a nearly standardized procedure, the same cannot be stated for the assessment of the compliance of products with CE principles, as better stressed in the following section.…”