Analyzing Conflicts Between Product Assembly and Disassembly for Achieving Sustainability

Environmental performance of a product could be increased throughout its life cycle by incorporating design requirements which consider Design for Disassembly (DfD) from a life cycle perspective by aiding ease of disassembly of the product across its life cycle. These design requirements, including DfD for different life cycle phases, should be made compatible with Design for Assembly (DfA) requirements within an integrated framework. Using such an integrated framework should reduce various layers of complexity introduced into design and should help designers to develop products that are easy to both assemble and disassemble, without compromising the product’s functionality. Prerequisites to developing the integrated framework are to: understand the requirements for DfD and DfA, identify if they are in conflict with one another, understand the underlying causes, and develop means to resolve these. To determine whether DfD and DfA requirements conflict one another, various existing products are analyzed, for conflicts among their assembly and disassembly processes. Various conflicts are found to be present among these processes. These conflicts are outlined, and possible causes for these are identified.