Eco-design is a part of a product design process with the aim to reduce the environmental impact of the product during its entire life cycle. Despite of recognition on the strategic level and growing market interest for green products, the practical implementation of eco-design in industry, especially small and medium size enterprises, is slow. One of the reasons is lack of simple and practical tools. An important part of the product design process having considerable consequences for the environment and human health is the material selection. Therefore, we aimed at development of a screening and ranking tool, which would address 3 issues – toxic dispersion, material use and embodied energy - from a life cycle perspective. The offered set of criteria provide the 5-level grading system expressed in the following words: negligible, low, moderate, high, very high. Development of criteria is based on the following information sources and considerations: • Criterion on embodied energy of the material is based on information on MJ of energy, necessary for extraction and production of 1 kg of the raw material. Further processing of the material requires some energy as well, but it is usually less than in the initial production, and therefore disregarded. • Criterion on toxic dispersion is based on information on classification and labelling system (e.g. hazard communication tool enforced by legislation [6]), environmental properties of chemical (mobility, stability), binding to the product matrix, use patterns of the product and end of life scenario. • Recyclability criterion is based on the inherent recyclability of the material, product design and end of life scenario of the product. This criteria system is utilising information, which shall be available for the producer of the product e.g. article (design, use, potential end of the life scenario), or which can be obtained from suppliers (e.g. properties of chemical substances within materials); however, some information has to be obtained from the publicly available and commercial data basis. The method is universal and applicable for different products; the quantitative results are suitable only for internal use within company. Nevertheless, this criteria system promotes collection of information, which can be valuable for application of other tools and instruments e.g. eco-labelling. Although new EU legislation – REACH places all responsibility on the supplier of the chemicals (e.g. producer of importer) requesting that all the chemicals placed on the market must be safe for the intended use there is still a place also for producers of articles to screen the chosen materials regarding the content of chemicals since the common legislation usually sets the minimum standards, which might not be sufficient for a company aiming at the products with higher environmental performance or having higher social responsibility. Also, the “safety” of the materials depends very much on the implementation level of REACH, especially with regard to the imported materials.