While quality tools are familiar to industries for the continuous improvement of products, the associated tools can be adopted to make significant contributions that address environmental concerns. This aligns eco-design with the product improvement process. This thesis proposes an eco-design improvement method, in which the eco-design tools are systematically integrated for the purpose of reducing environmental impacts. In this context, this work focuses on the adaptations of quality tools for supporting the generation of new eco-design concepts.            
The developed methodology consists of three major phases. The first phase is concerned with the development of a relational matrices model. This phase is intended to explicitly capture the information of an existing design via relational models. These models are based on the integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and functional analysis (FA). The QFD process requires mapping quality attributes and design attributes to identify the attributes’ relationships to the existing design. The integration approach used is based on developed relational matrices to capture the relationships among environmental requirements, engineering metrics, design functions and physical components. In addition, FA focuses on functional decomposition of a design to support the generation of design concepts. One important feature of this phase is to connect the environmental requirements to the design functions.        
The second phase is concerned with the generation of design concepts. In this phase, after identifying the functions that are responsible for reducing environmental impacts, a morphological chart is used to support the synthesis of new design concepts. The third phase considers environmental impact assessments and concept selection. In this phase, two methods are developed: Pugh chart and fuzzy assessment. The Pugh chart is intended to evaluate the newly generated concepts via the delegated engineering metrics. As well, fuzzy assessment is intended to capture the imprecise design information at the conceptual design stage. To address this research problem using fuzzy assessments, the trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are first applied to capture imprecise design information for each design concept. A decision guide is also proposed to suggest a course of action based on the results of fuzzy assessments. This phase is also concerned with ways to incorporate such imprecise information with eco-indicators for decision making.        
Finally, for the demonstration and validation, the proposed methodology is applied to three case examples. These examples are in two different contexts. The methodology is first applied to home appliances, which are a coffee maker and hair dryer. Then, the suggested methodology is extended to the forming processes, specifically, the diaphragm forming process (DFP). This application of the diaphragm process is demonstrated through the assessment of the energy consumption of the usage stage. The developed methodology illustrates potential reduction in energy consumption for the generated designs of the applied examples. The results show the applicability of the proposed methodology.