Abstract
As sustainability becomes increasingly important, product design is taking a proactive role in producing products that are both useful and sustainable. This paper introduces and discusses a tool named Environment-based life cycle decomposition (eLCD) to adapt the Environment-based Design (EBD) methodology to sustainable design. The eLCD brings to EBD three major features: 1) a holistic environment structure for sustainable conceptual design, 2) an effective and efficient tool for collecting information for sustainability decision-making, and 3) an analysis tool that takes sustainability as an integral part of the design rather than as a burden. The environment of a product is everything except the product itself, which can be defined in three dimensions, namely, environment types, life cycle events, and life cycle time. The environment types are designated as natural, built (including physical artifact and digital artifact), economic, and social environment. The eLCD provides an effective template for information collection to support the design decision-making process. The effectiveness of eLCD is demonstrated by its application to the upscaling of a wind turbine, where an energy storage system is introduced to make full use of wind energy with the least waste in serving the electricity demand.