Lifespan Extension for Environmental Benefits: A new Concept of Products with Several Distinct Usage Phases

End-of-Life (EoL) strategies, and especially products’ lifespan extension, are becoming key issues for more and more manufacturers. Their implementations have to be done from the design stage and may be facilitated with design methodologies and guidelines. However, if a function of the system is no longer efficient enough during its use phase, in such a way that remanufacturing and upgrading may not be considered, the system has reached its final EoL, even if it might have been used for other applications.To address such kind of situations, the present paper investigates the concept of Design-2-Life (D2L) systems. To do so, EoL strategies will be explored to understand the key issues. Then a clear explanation of D2L concept will be proposed as well as its main characteristics. Finally we will discuss the challenges of this new approach and the advantages to develop it under a PSS framework. The case of batteries used in electric cars will be used to illustrate the concept.