Eco-design: state of the art equipment available

Regulations, standards and market pressures are leading more and more companies to develop a preventive approach to integrating the environment right from the product design stage. This approach minimizes impacts at source, with a view to preventing pollution throughout the product or service life cycle, i.e. from the extraction of raw materials to end-of-life, i.e. "from the cradle to the grave". It is far preferable to the curative approach, i.e. the treatment of the environmental impacts generated by an activity, which still dominates industrial culture.

Ecodesign is not a recent phenomenon: since the 1990s, the European Union has been developing tools for recognizing approaches, such as the ecolabel in 1992, and directives in various fields to encourage players to take action.

Ecodesign is defined in the technical report ISO/TR 14062 as "the integration of environmental aspects into product design and development". Since the early 2000s, this integration of environmental considerations right from the product design stage, with the term "product" encompassing both material goods and services, has developed strongly, and companies are increasingly perceiving eco-design as a competitive challenge and a source of innovation. However, the approach is still not widely applied in small and medium-sized businesses.

Ecodesign is also driven by one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN agenda adopted in September 2015 concerning sustainable consumption and production patterns, aiming to "do more and better with less".

One of the difficulties encountered in implementing this approach stems from the profusion of eco-design tools available, which are difficult to grasp. These tools take a variety of approaches (qualitative versus quantitative; impact assessment versus recommendations, etc.), from the simplest, most pragmatic tools possible to the most elaborate software-type tools, designed to help the user in his job. The aim of this article is first to propose a mapping of these tools, classifying them according to their type of approach. This is followed by a more specific and detailed presentation of each type of tool. A final section is devoted to a more pragmatic approach to these tools, based on the stages of product development, the players involved in using them in an eco-design approach, and future prospects.