Integrating AESA into Eco-design: A Case Study on A Dress
Résumé
Eco-design is a structured approach that considers environmental aspects in the design and development process to minimize negative environmental impacts throughout a product’s life cycle. It includes environmental assessments (both initial and comparative) to identify hotspots and to propose strategies that reduce overall impact while managing impact transfers. The most commonly used tool for quantitative assessment is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which evaluates the potential environmental impacts of a product across its life cycle. LCA has helped improve product environmental performance by providing a clearer representation of environmental impacts, making it easier to mitigate them. However, despite these improvements, the latest update to the planetary boundaries framework indicates that six of nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Reducing a product’s impact relative to a reference is insufficient in the face of continuously growing consumption. Yet, comparing an eco-designed solution to a reference product remains a core aspect of the ecodesign process. To address this limitation, our work focuses on proposing a method to integrate the Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA) into the environmental assessment steps of the eco-design process. Integrating the recent AESA method into the well-established eco-design approach aims to guide choices toward absolutely sustainable strategies. We will present a method for integrating AESA into the eco-design process, which was tested on a dress as part of a study. This test highlighted the crucial role of product usage scenarios throughout its lifespan in assessing sustainability—specifically, the frequency of use in relation to wardrobe size. This opens discussions on how usage scenarios influence rebound effects, particularly in anticipating scale effects in eco-design.