LACROIX

“Eco-design involves the inclusion of environmental considerations at the design stage of a product or service, and thereafter during all stages of its life cycle”. (AFNOR 2004)

Given the same importance as functional, technical, aesthetic and cost criteria, the Electronics activity of LACROIX includes environmental criteria in the design process for your on-board systems or industrial IoT products. The challenge is finding the best balance between these criteria.

Taking into account the entire product life cycle, from raw materials to end of life, our experts use three levers when designing the product to reduce its environmental impact :

  1. Offering customers more eco-friendly materials is where it all begins
  2. Streamlining and anticipating, the two golden rules in eco-design
  3. Reducing the number of assembly processes, the key to better

Offering customers more eco-friendly materials is where it all begins

  • We favour the use of more environmentally-sound materials. In order to comply with REACH and RoHS standards, the raw materials we offer when manufacturing a product minimise the natural resources used, protect the health of users by using non-toxic or less toxic materials and minimise the environmental impact of our products. This concerns all the components of a product: casing, electronic components, PCB, packaging, etc.
  • We promote the use of recyclable or recycled materials for product packaging. We work hand-in-hand with our suppliers to find environmentally-sound technical solutions.
  • We optimise product recyclability: when developing the product casing, we offer optimal technical solutions that enable materials to be separated easily for recycling.
  • We favour using suppliers located nearest wherever possible in order to reduce the environmental impact of transport of all the parts used to manufacture the product.

Streamlining and anticipating, the two golden rules in eco-design

  • We anticipate component obsolescence right from the design phase to make the design as sustainable as possible.
  • We minimise the number of parts used for a product by favouring “multi-action” components, for example; this reduces the weight of the product and the raw materials used for it.
  • We optimise the electrical consumption of our electronic assemblies by opting for low consumption components and by optimising operating, standby and shutdown modes, etc.
  • We choose the lowest energy consumption: battery, solar panel, etc. Software developments optimise the operating modes of users and components through applying the following philosophy: “I only consume what I need for what I want to do”.
  • We look to make products repairable. We design the product so that it can be easily dismantled, which means we can reduce scrap and optimise repairs in After-Sales Service.

Reducing the number of assembly processes, the key to better manufacturing

  • We try to limit the number of assembly processes in order to eliminate the use of non-essential production materials such as glue, which is a chemical pollutant. This also means we can use fewer natural resources in the production process (e.g. electricity, water).
  • Our manufacturing tools are designed to limit the environmental impact of a product: discover our eco-production solutions.