Why the Upgradability is a Present-day Opportunity for Designing Sustainable Systems?

The accelerating rhythm of products renewal causes accelerated exploitation of materials and energy. To remedy this, this paper considers upgradability from the point of view of functionality: the goal is to design an upgrade scenario taking into account a multi-criteria assessment: environmental impact-cost-attractiveness for the consumers. An experiment based on the UpMoS tool and data from the past of electronic device simulates different design hypotheses. With a non-systematic integration of known developments and upgrading design tips like recycling, improving “by plug” and oversizing to delay replacing, the results show that upgradability is a present-day opportunity to develop sustainable systems. Environmental gains are in the order of 5%. Others promising design levers to obtain much more positive results are presented in discussion.