Climate change, shortage of resources and loss of biodiversity – To tackle the big environmental challenges of our time, it is essential to make products more sustainable. In doing so, it’s important not only to look at the manufacturing stage, but the entire life cycle. Starting with the extraction of raw materials from the environment and ending with the recycling or disposal of the product.

A widely recognized and proven method to identify the environmental footprint of a product is Life Cycle Assessment. But so far, most of the environmental investigations are made of final products. Although up to 80% of the environmental burdens and costs are based on decisions made in the early concept phase. Hence there is a need to integrate these criteria seamlessly in the design process of products.

The main goal is to enable better and faster communication between the product development department and the environmental department. This will enable engineers to find the right compromise between technical, environmental and economic criteria. It will also enable them to select the best materials and manufacturing technologies for the design of a new type of urban electric vehicle.

With the Nexpirit Teamcenter Sustainability Solution we removed the communication barriers between standalone lifecycle assessment solutions and engineering focused PLM-Systems. By enriching the product, process and material information with a comprehensive environmental performance and costs module, design for sustainability is enabled.

This enables engineers to perform cost-effective environmental and economic investigations at every stage of the development process. It reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector and strengthen the position of the European market in the light electric vehicle segment.