Sustainable Product Development

Product development is commonly perceived as the most fundamental approach to reduce the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle. This life cycle includes the extraction of raw materials, material production, parts production, final assembly, use of product, and end-of-life operations including all transportation processes (aka cradle-to-grave or if material flows are closed in a circular economy approach also aka cradle-to-cradle). In contrast to purchasing and supply chain management (see Chap. 5 ), changes to product development have rather limited opportunities to improve social aspects beyond the product characteristics itself. Product development is an important factor in the economic success or failure of products and services. However, conventional product development approaches are limited in scope: economic life cycle impacts are not fully covered. Instead, the focus is on product cost or, in the best case, the cost of ownership of the first customer. In cases where repair costs are also considered, economic and environmental considerations overlap. Rarely, end-of-life costs are included in traditional product development. A selection of approaches for integrating sustainability into product development is described in this chapter.