Stephan Hankammer

A Preparatory Approach to Environmental Assessment for Sustainable Mass Customization

Mass customization (MC) is a growing trend in industry that fulfils the demand of customers for personalized products and services. Parallel to customization, more regulations and demand for sustainable products and environmental business practices have increased importance on the agenda of businesses today. However, the knowledge about the implementation of sustainable mass customization (SMC) models is still mainly theoretical. The SMC Excel project presents an approach for the development of an SMC environmental assessment based on life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology for a TV. The environmental assessment method denominated SMC Excel Sustainability Approach (SESA) presented in this study aims to provide reliable information of the environmental impacts of a product (TV) while serving as an efficient and applicable assessment methodology for MC. General requirements for the SESA are described and applied to a case study of a TV. Furthermore, the result of a full-scale LCA of a standard TV model is compared with those impacts obtained by SESA, which indicated that the variance between both results is nominal and, thus, SESA can represent a valid approach for environmental assessment methodologies. Additionally, with the test case scenario of a take-back service where both methods are compared, the impact disparity is similarly low. Nevertheless, further research and testing are required in order to improve accuracy and methodological procedures of the SESA method.