Eco-redesign of lighting products

Although there are numerous published studies that have helped to enhance our understanding about methods or approaches to eco-design products, there are limited publications that focus on the study of eco-redesign of lighting products. Redesign of existing products is one of the most applied design-related activities in industry, and eco-redesign is one of the most suitable eco-design interventions that can be applied by manufacturers when they want to include environmental considerations in their existing products. This type of eco-design intervention is incremental, which typically means less change, and therefore, lower investments of time, money, and correspondent risks. It consists of selecting an existing product from a given portfolio and redesigning it to reduce its environmental impact. This paper presents and demonstrates, with an example of a manufacturing company, a method to eco-redesign lighting products. The method is based in the iterative combination of an analysis-synthesis approach involving: (1) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impact of the lighting product, (2) Identification of the specific issues which typically cause the impact in the product life cycle stages and components, and (3) Specific eco-lighting design strategies to address the areas of impact (and causes of that impact) identified with the LCA. This method can be applied as a stand-alone method or be integrated into existing design and development processes and methods already used by companies, to facilitate its adoption, and hence impact. Insights and limitations after the application of the method are also discussed.