A Method for Assessing the Environmental Friendliness of Products

Many industrial products are environmentally unfriendly. The pollution, waste, and hazardous materials that they generate are dangerous and costly to society. They reduce quality of life (QOL). This article posits that just as in estimating production costs (private costs), the cost of environmental impact (public cost) must also be estimated at the developmental stages of new products. Thus, environmentally unfriendly products can be eliminated. A measure of environmental friendliness is proposed in this article. Such a measure can enable manufacturers to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly products. This effort may lead in the direction of generating more friendly products and hence improve QOL.