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There are a number of ways in which businesses involved with producing electrical and electronic equipment can benefit from efficient product design.

Using efficient design for your products will help you to comply with legislation that controls product design, eg restrictions on energy use and hazardous substances - see energy labelling and ecodesign of energy-related products and restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS).

Efficient product design can also enable you to cut your costs - for example, by reducing the amount you pay to buy materials and dispose of waste.

Marketing opportunities

Designing your products so that they can be easily serviced and upgraded to extend the product's lifetime can provide marketing benefits and enhance brand value. This may include:

• considering higher specification components, sub-assemblies and printed circuit boards to provide greater product reliability
• designing parts for equal lifetime, since failure of a single part often means that the whole product is discarded
• designing for disassembly to ensure that products can be taken apart efficiently
• modularising to enable product upgrade and repair
• ensuring replaceable and upgradable components have easy accessibility
• considering how best to supply spares
• reducing packaging materials
• planning for end of life reuse and recycling
• reducing whole-of-life energy use

Using environmental labelling or green claims can provide marketing benefits by highlighting that your products are designed specifically to reduce their overall environmental impact - see how to market your environmental credentials.

Supply chain

By presenting yourself as a business with environmental credentials, you can exert pressure on your suppliers by:

• dealing only with suppliers that have an environmental management system certified to a standard such as ISO 14001
• asking your suppliers to demonstrate that they manufacture their products, components or materials in an environmentally responsible manner
• looking out for suppliers that offer sustainable product design advice on the sub-assemblies they manufacture

Reducing the costs and environmental impact of suppliers may mean that they can charge you less - see supply chain efficiency.

Functionality and service innovation

Efficient product design can stimulate innovation and lead to radical changes in your products themselves. For example, if customers simply want to use the service provided by a product, then leasing may be the best way forward. The ongoing income stream provided by selling services can be advantageous to your business model.

You should consider eco-design as early as possible in the development process for electrical and electronic products. You can incorporate it into your product development by:

• raising awareness of eco-design at the concept stage and then providing continual reminders throughout the process
• introducing checklists to capture eco-design improvement opportunities and ensuring they are addressed throughout the process
• communicating good design tips and ideas and discussing eco-design issues

You should also consider:

• investing time at the concept and feasibility stages as this will pay dividends and avoid the need for more expensive design changes later in the design process
• clearly defining the feasibility stage and production of design specifications early on with all relevant business aspects and external stakeholders
• training key staff in the team on eco-design issues, approaches and tools
• keeping your design-systems' hardware and software up to date and encouraging your product development team to keep up with the latest developments

You should think about how design changes will affect other stages and aspects of the product's lifecycle, such as:

• purchasing
• manufacturing
• distribution
• marketing
• quality
• health and safety

For more information on the processes involved in eco-design, see ecodesign for goods and services.

When designing electrical and electronic equipment you should consider the way you will use raw materials. Using fewer materials and fewer different types over the lifecycle of products will generate less waste and can deliver cost and environmental benefits. You should aim for the design to be as simple, and to have as few components, as possible.

You can use engineering principles to minimise the use of resources, including:

• defining realistic requirements for stiffness and strength
• optimising part dimensions - for example, by using finite element analysis
• considering alternatives to thick-walled sections, such as ribbed structures, where stiffness is required
• selecting the most appropriate materials for the product lifecycle

You should consider product design at the same time as packaging design. This can help you to keep packaging to a minimum and could offer opportunities for the packaging to be used within the product once it gets to the consumer.

Package design

Packaging has to protect goods, enable easy handling and distribution, present information and act as a marketing tool for the product. However, you can design packaging so that it uses materials efficiently while ensuring that it does these jobs effectively.

Good design has a vital role to play in producing packaging that is effective and minimises the impacts on the environment. Reviewing the materials and design of your products' packaging may identify opportunities to:

• improve the protection of your product
• eliminate or reduce your packaging requirement
• optimise your packaging use, ie matching the packaging to the level of protection needed
• introduce reusable transit packaging
• use recycled materials

These approaches will deliver cost savings by minimising your consumption of resources and the quantities of waste for disposal. For more information, see our packaging design essential top tips.

Selecting the attachment technique that is used to assemble and disassemble your electrical and electronic products requires careful consideration.

The choice of attachment type is likely to depend on assembly cost and required performance parameters during the product's lifetime. For example, you'll need to decide whether the attachment is permanent during the product's lifetime or if it needs to be reversible for servicing, repair or upgrade. Your choice will affect the purity of recycled materials and hence their value. Reversible attachments need to be accessible, easy to remove and durable, and will give purer materials after disassembly.

Where fasteners are used, you should consider:

• making fastening points accessible, visible and clearly marked
• using a simple component orientation
• using screws in place of rivets for easier disassembly at the end of the product's life
• standardising screw heads to aid assembly and disassembly
• avoiding assemblies that require power tools
• using fasteners of the same material as the parts to be joined to optimise recycling opportunities at the end of the product's life

You can design snap-fits to allow rapid and efficient disassembly of the product, eg by ensuring that the tines are easily accessible. However, in some cases they may not provide adequate pressure on connecting parts, for example to ensure adequate conductive continuity in products requiring shielding from electromagnetic interference, and in areas with high levels of vibration.

You should avoid joining dissimilar materials using adhesives or welding. Staking techniques for joining thermoplastic parts to other materials can provide a low-cost approach, but reduce opportunities for end-of-life materials and component recycling.

By considering the materials used in your electrical and electronic products, you could improve their recyclability and overall environmental impact.

Plastics

Though a large proportion of electrical and electronic equipment is made out of plastic to reduce manufacturing costs, current recycling technology cannot return the plastic to its original performance specification. To help with recycling, you should use as few types of plastic as possible.

Discussions with materials suppliers should help you to decide whether to use a specialist plastic or a commodity plastic. Commodity plastics are generally cheaper and may provide greater security of supply compared to specialist plastics.

You should also consider the design of the injection moulding process. Some design features and process steps can degrade polymers and reduce the quality of the plastic for recycling.

In some cases, there may be opportunities to use both virgin polymer and the same type of recycled polymer for different parts of the product. This will not affect recycling value at the product's end of life and may offer cost savings.

To help the recycling process at the product's end of life, you should mark plastic polymers with the material category and date of manufacture. Flexible tooling using tool inserts will allow you to change in-mould marking if the polymer material is changed.

Metals

Reverting to using metal instead of plastics would require you to improve your product designs to make components and sub-assemblies thinner, smaller, lighter or less numerous. Using heavier metals may have impacts on transport and fuel efficiency when your products are distributed.

Metal also has higher embedded carbon than other materials, so you should remember this if your business is looking to reduce its carbon footprint. If you use metals such as aluminium with recycled content, this can bring the embedded carbon down significantly.

New metal alloys are being developed which may offer additional end-of-life benefits compared to plastics.

Labelling, adhesives and coatings

You should avoid labels and adhesives unless they are compatible with the moulding polymer for recycling.

You can mould information on to a product using a different surface finish to increase visibility. Consider ultrasonic welding, heat staking and spin welding, hot-plate or hot-gas welding where an adhesive with recycling compatibility is not available.

You should make sure your products are marked with a crossed-out wheeled bin symbol - see waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE).

You should design electrical and electronic equipment so that the use of hazardous substances is kept to a minimum.

Your products must comply with limits on the use of certain hazardous substances. Alternatives for these hazardous substances should be used where possible:

• Lead - alloys based on tin-silver-copper (Sn-Ag-Cu) will probably be the first choice to replace lead solder. Tin-silver-bismuth (Sn-Ag-Bi) type alloys are likely to be used for surface mount consumer products and tin-copper (Sn-Cu) solders may be developed for wave soldering.
• Mercury - most manufacturers phased out the use of mercury in these applications in the early 1990s. Today, there are drop-in replacements for these components which do not use mercury.
• Cadmium - alternatives include tin and its alloys, zinc and its alloys, ion vapour deposition, nickel and epoxide.
• Hexavalent chromium - where coatings are required, alternatives include zinc-based coatings and compounds, nickel-based coatings, copper, silver, modified primer or paint technologies.
• Brominated flame retardants - flame retardants are added to polymers used in electrical and electronic products to ensure that they meet international standards. Halogen-free flame retardants include aluminium trioxide, magnesium hydroxide, magnesium carbonate, phosphate esters, melamine derivatives and zinc borate.

For more information on the legal limits that apply, see restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS).

Regular consultation with component suppliers, printed circuit board (PCB) fabricators and assemblers is essential to reducing manufacturing and assembly costs.

For electrical and electronic product design, you should start with component specification as this has a knock-on effect on other production issues.

The packaging of components has a major impact on the design of PCBs and how easy they are to assemble. Some components are available with a range of packaging options.

Design rules for PCBs

Once the component specification has been agreed, you should use the design rules provided by fabricators and assemblers to guide the PCB design. Maximising hole sizes, making tracks and gaps bigger and reducing the number of layers will optimise yield and reduce cost at the fabricator and assembler.

Your designer should agree the testing process to be used with the assembly house and design the PCB to allow simple, quick and effective testing.

Design-for-manufacturing (DFM)

DFM checking is a common practice to ensure well-manufactured design geometries. There are considerable benefits from carrying out DFM checking at the design stage, such as fewer revision spins and faster time to market, as well as reduced fabrication and assembly costs.

The design software currently used by designers checks the electronic functionality of the PCB design, but may not include DFM checking. In this case, designers should consider investing in DFM software.

Although the software is supplied with a generic set of fabrication and assembly design rules, you should advise designers to customise the software with the design rules for their individual fabricators and assemblers.

When designing electrical and electronic equipment you should consider the financial and environmental impact of different options for connections and power requirements.

Connections

For component and printed circuit board (PCB) connections, you should consider:

• standardising connector types to aid assembly
• designing modules and sub-assemblies to be independently testable
• using plug-in boards to aid assembly and disassembly
• making high-value components surface-mounted or socket-fitted to aid removal from units that fail quality inspections and make it easier for components to be reused at the end of the product's life
• grouping hazardous materials and components together on the PCB and incorporating perforated 'snap lines'

Power requirements

Designing products with lower energy consumption provides tangible cost savings to customers and can be exploited as a valuable marketing benefit. You can design electronic products to minimise energy consumption and costs during use by:

• using low voltage logic
• designing an energy efficient standby mode - or removing the standby mode altogether
• making the product compatible with other energy efficient devices
• increasing the thermal tolerance of the design to avoid the use of cooling fans or air conditioning
• improving the insulation of hot or cold elements
• looking at recovery of excess heat output

Manufacturers, suppliers and importers of energy-using and energy related products are required to consider the environmental impact of products in the design stages under the European Ecodesign Directive. Once products are covered by implementing measures - usually in the form of regulations - manufacturers and suppliers have to achieve minimum energy efficiency standards, carry out conformity testing and affix a CE mark. For detailed information on these requirements see energy labelling and ecodesign of energy-related products.

You should consider using batteries with high energy efficiency and low environmental impact. Nickel metal hydride offers more than twice the volumetric energy density - energy stored within a given volume - of cheaper nickel cadmium batteries.

Lithium ion (LiON) batteries offer still higher energy density. LiON batteries are smaller, lighter and contain less heavy metal content.

You must make sure that any batteries you use comply with limits on hazardous substances - see batteries responsibilities for business.