Design for Environment

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Design for Environment (DfE) is a general concept that refers to a variety of design approaches that attempt to reduce the overall environmental impact of a product, process or service, where environmental impacts are considered across its life cycle. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is employed to forecast the impacts of different (production) alternatives of the product in question, thus being able to choose the environmentally most friendly. Different software tools have been developed to assist designers in finding optimised products (or processes/services). Design for Environment includes several subsidiary approaches, such as Design for Disassembly (to facilitate recycling) and source reduction.