Application of Sustainability Strategies in the Design of an Electric Scooter

In the current design activity, sustainability requirements should be added to technical, ergonomic or functional product specifications and suitable methods to address sustainability aspects should be applied. In this work, an engineering approach based on the use of metrics and quantitative indicators along with a product life cycle perspective and a sustainability concept regarding simultaneously environmental, economic and social dimensions are applied to achieve a more sustainable design of an electric scooter. These approaches, which are only partially applied in most previous studies, are integrated to analyze the effects of different sustainability strategies such as increasing the use of lower impact and recycled materials, acquiring components from local suppliers and improving the material recovery and recycling processes at the end of the product life. A product design with improved sustainability indicators is finally proposed.