All the industrial activities consume resources and energy, pollute and compromise the future of the planet by global warming, atmospheric ozone depletion, accumulation of pollutants often under organic forms particularly harmful for human, animal, vegetal and aquatic life. To preserve the essential needs of future generations during a maximum time it is essential to think all our actions and to design all the products and goods for a better sustainability. There are no perfect answers to this grave problem but several more or less easy ways allow more or less improvement of sustainability. Figure 1 schematically displays some of these tracks without claiming to be exhaustive.
Times to failure during service life for a given part obey a Gaussian distribution. It is possible to improve lifetime by acting on the average value by an upgrading of the polymer compound or/and on the lowest values by reduction of premature failures.
* Misconceptions for 10 up to 70% of the cases
* Processing defects for 20 up to 50% of the cases
* Abnormal service conditions for 10 up to 40% of the cases.