September 18, 2025
LET'S TALK ABOUT ECODESIGN
WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO USE IT IN A BENEFICIAL AND USEFUL MANNER (FOR THE ENVIRONMENT)
Eco Design: another of the many expressions that we meet every day in our work.
But what does it really mean? In a general sense, it means designing a product with sustainability as the goal.
From inception, it considers how to change the very nature of the product, in our case the rubber flooring recipe and production methods, to arrive at a finished product with less impacts on the environment.
Typically, we try to replace ingredients that have a greater environmental impact with alternatives that are typically of recycled or rapidly renewable origin.
To understand how such innovations may work in practice, it is necessary to evaluate how we arrive at the many numbers present in an EPD.
There are software tools defined and accepted by the certifying bodies that, when properly used by loading the process parameters, ingredients and much more, feed in data from special databases to attribute GWP values (and all the other parameters).
Using LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) software, you can simulate different versions of the product and see how the impact is reduced by replacing certain ingredients or making changes to the machines and processes.
This allows you to design by seeing, in real time, the final result of the various options that can technically be put in place to obtain improvements, in terms of emissions and all the relevant parameters to measure sustainability.
It is a complex and inevitable exercise to design the products of the future on a scientific basis, and we are excited to do so.
Let’s try some simple examples:
We see that ingredient A is responsible for an emission of 1.2 kg of CO2eq.
Let’s imagine that you can replace ingredient A in the product recipe with a combination of ingredient B and ingredient C, whose individual emissions contribute 0.3 kg and 0.8 kg of CO2eq., for a better outcome.
In general, anything that is recycled does not carry CO2 with it, because it has already taken account for its emissions when it was first produced.
On the other hand, rapidly renewable ingredients (e.g., ingredients with a harvest cycle of ten years or less, such as rice) have a contribution that can be negative. In fact, during their life, plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to minimize the greenhouse effect.
It is very much an intricate chess game, as you must also always take into account performance and cost.
The real difficulty is in fact to keep the products stable, because the real success of sustainability projects is when eco-design ensures that an equal or better performance is achieved, while securing comparable costs.
At Artigo, we have been working successfully in this way for some years, with proven results.
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