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What is eco-design?

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THEeco-design, also called ecological design or sustainable design, is an approach to the design of products and services that takes into account environmental impact throughout its life cycle, from the designing until recycling. This approach is becoming increasingly popular in the industry, as it reduces the environmental impact of products and services, while improving their efficiency and profitability.

According to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, 80% of French companies have implemented eco-design measures.

To better understand how it works, you need to visualize the life cycle of a product that includes several stages. These include design, manufacturing, distribution, distribution, use, and end of life. Each step can have a significant environmental impact, in terms of consumption of raw materials, energy and greenhouse gas emissions.

Before eco-design, businesses focused primarily on reducing production costs and maximizing product performance. This means that the products were designed to satisfy the customer without putting the environment first.

Now, with theeco-design, businesses are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of their products and services. Eco-design allows businesses to design products that are more sustainable and more efficient. This may include using recycled materials, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, designing for sustainability, and making it easy to recycle.

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The pros and cons of eco-design 

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The advantages ofeco-design are numerous.

• Reducing the environmental impact of products and services throughout their life cycle
• Reduction of production and transport costs
• Use of more sustainable materials
• Reduced energy needs
• Improving the quality and sustainability of products
• Increase in their value to consumers
• Improving the brand image of companies, showing their commitment to the environment

More specifically, ADEME announced that eco-design can allow savings in raw materials of the order of 20 to 50%, as well as energy savings of the order of 30 to 60% over the entire life cycle of the product.

We also talk about a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 20 to 50%, and in emissions of air pollutants by 50 to 80%.

However, there are also disadvantages to eco-design.

• Expensive set-up
• Need to invest in research and development
• Need to train staff
• Practice more complex than traditional design
• Potential to result in performance or cost trade-offs

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The applications of eco-design at LGC Industries

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LGC Industries works with customers on every facet of product design to improve their lifecycle.

We thus directly offer a material with the appropriate hardness in order to eliminate a heat treatment operation. We want to reduce packaging waste, in particular by giving priority to packaging in bags in a large box, rather than sending one bag per box to the customer.

L'eco-design also involves the adaptation of our product ranges:

• The Fluting on our pins makes it possible to eliminate the boring operation
• The manufacture of sockets was previously carried out from a solid bar that required drilling and generated a lot of machining chips and tool wear. Now the sockets are produced from a tube in order to no longer generate drilling chips.
• With our customer, we modified the design of his part to manufacture a rosette socket from a specially shaped tube. This saves us from carrying out the decolleting of the rosette and thus allows us to reduce our chip waste.

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Conclusion

The future of eco-design is bright as more and more businesses recognize its importance for sustainability and long-term profitability. We can expect to see increasing adoption of eco-design across industries as businesses seek to meet consumer expectations for complying with environmental regulations and improving their brand image.

At LGC Industries, we are proud of our 85 years of expertise in the field of cylindrical fastening solutions. We do everything we can to help our customers Designing together products adapted to their specific needs. We are available to support you at each stage of your project and offer you a personalized and quality service. If you have questions or want to know more about our products and services, do not hesitate to contact us via our website.

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Thank you for reading and see you soon at LGC Industries!

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