A living-sphere approach for locally oriented sustainable design

Jnl Remanufactur https://doi.org/10.1007/s13243-018-0048-8 RESEARCH A living-sphere approach for locally oriented sustainable design Hideki Kobayashi 1 & Shinichi Fukushige 1 Received: 22 February 2018 / Accepted: 3 July 2018 # The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Achieving a sustainable consumption and production pattern is one of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals for 2030. To achieve this, it is necessary to consider the environmental burden from a product life cycle and the quality of life of the consumer. In this study, a systematic approach for connecting basic human needs and the product development process, called the living-sphere approach, is proposed. This approach is intended to encompass the complete relationship between region-specific basic needs and durable products. In this approach, value graphs, which visualize the value system of products, are connected to satisfiers fulfilling the basic needs set out by Max-Neef. A value graph links satisfiers and the traditional product development process. The significance of the proposed approach is twofold. First, improving quality of daily life and traditional product development are combined in the same framework. Second, the design of single products and the total optimization of multi-products are supported at the requirement level. Keywords Sustainable design . Environmentally conscious design (eco-design) . Local community . Basic human needs . Quality of life (QoL) . Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) Introduction Realizing a sustainable society is one of the most challenging problems that humanity faces. The United Nations has adopted a global framework for international cooperation, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the framework’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [35]. In the most frequently quoted definition, sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future * Hideki Kobayashi 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Yamada-oka 2-1, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan Jnl Remanufactur generations to meet their own needs” [40]. Sustainable development should be seen as a process that provides humanity with a pathway to survival and living a good life on Earth [4]. In this study, we treat sustainability as an ideal system state and sustainable development as an on-going process to achieve the ideal [23]. Achieving a sustainable consumption and production (SCP) pattern [38, 39] is an SDG. Figure 1 indicates that population growth and waste generation are not decoupled in OECD countries [24]. This trend is the same as the global trend, which includes low-income countries [13]. Global waste generation in 2100 is estimated to be 2.9 times that in 2010. In the estimate [13], 72% of global waste generation in 2100 is from East Asia, Asia-Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Realizing an SCP pattern for developed countries and developing countries is critical for global sustainability. To achieve an SCP pattern, it is necessary to consider reducing the environmental load caused by production and manufacturing and sufficiency or quality of life (QoL) of the consumer. It is expected that a package of policies, information services, and product development focusing on the improvement of QoL without increasing environmental load will be developed where high economic growth is forecast such as in Asian countries. Traditional eco-product design methods and methodologies for reducing the environmental load of a product life cycle have been developed and eco-design guidelines are being standardized [15, 37]. Although eco-products are being diffused gradually in industrialized countries [33, 34], no QoL-conscious eco-product design methodology for emergent or developing countries has been established. In this study, locally oriented sustainable design implies that local or region-specific conditions are reflected in the specifications or eco-design ideas of a product in the design stage. We propose a systematic approach connecting the sufficiency of the daily life of a consumer and the product development process, called the living-sphere approach. We describe a framework for the living-sphere approach. We focus on the part of the function or structure that is affected strongly by region-specific conditions, such as history, culture, habits, and social infrastructure. We assume that it is impossible to separate human life completely from the land that people occupy. Related studies are surveyed in the next section, and the living-sphere approach is proposed in “Framework of the Living-sphere Approach”. 240 Total municipal waste generation Relative index (1980=100) 220 Population OECD 200 180 160 140 120 100 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 Years Fig. 1 Past and predicted OECD country municipal waste generation and population growth [24] Jnl Remanufactur The significance of the work and remaining issues are discussed in “Discussion”, and “Concluding remarks” are provided in the final section. Related works The so-called factor index describes the improvement ratio of eco-efficiency, which is the product value per unit of environmental load caused by the product life cycle [19]. Although this factor index of a product can be applied to industrial products generally, the total sufficiency of the needs or the factor index of a household cannot be quantified where various products are used in daily life. A study of the factor index calculation for a household focusing on home appliances has been reported [2]. However, the method cannot consider satisfaction and region-specific characteristics because it estimates the factor index focusing on only the technological progress in the basic product functions. The concepts of eco-efficiency and sufficiency are important in SCP patterns; however, these concepts are different [7, 38]. Ecoefficiency is a management philosophy that encourages business to search for environmental improvements that yield parallel economic benefits [38]. It focuses on business opportunities to become more environmentally responsible and more profitable, therefore, it is proposed from a viewpoint of production. On the other hand, the concept of “sufficiency” has emerged over the years as an alternative economic model to consumerism and a necessary component of sustainable lifestyles. Sufficiency challenges the notion that if some is good, then more must be better; instead, it emphasizes “enoughness” [38]. This paper focuses on sufficiency rather than eco-efficiency. Koren suggested that the personalization and regionalization in the manufacturing industry after globalization is a paradigm shift [21]. Here, we discuss personalization and regionalization in relation to the context dependency. For example, service engineering focuses on abstracting and valuing the context (...truncated)