  Lowering environmental impacts of products, i.e. ecodesign, is considered
today as a new and promising approach environment protection. This article
focuses on ecodesign in the aeronautical sector through the analysis of the
practices of a company that designs and produces engine equipments. Noise, gas
emissions, fuel consumptions are the main environmental aspects which are
targeted by aeronautics. From now on, chemical risk linked to the use of
materials and production processes has to be traced, not only because of
regulation pressure (e.g. REACh) but also because of customers requirements. So
far, the aeronautical sector hasn't been focusing much on managing chemical
risks at the design stage. However, new substances regulations notably require
that chemical risk management should be by industries used as early as possible
in their product development process. The aeronautics sector has therefore to
elaborate new chemical risk management. The aim of this paper is to present a
new method hat should be adapted to aeronautical designers' practices and based
on simple entry data, but efficient enough to ensure a good substances
traceability all along the product design process. The method second objective
is also to guide the designer's materials and process choices by avoiding the
most chemically critical ones. The proposed method has been elaborated by an
industrial dedicated team and is based on four main steps. The structure, the
related tools and the parameters of the method have been chosen and developed
in order to be easily understood by non environmental experts, and directly
operational. The method is tested on a case study.
