SUSTAINABILITY CONSULTING ~ SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY & TRAINING ~ DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABILITY (DfS)

Fueling Product Innovation through Life Cycle Assessment

by Kimi Ceridon
SUMMARY

Across many industries, companies find integrating life cycle thinking and sustainability as a way to facilitate product team innovations rather than limit them. With life cycle thinking, product teams are not limited to evaluating just the function of a product. They are free to examine every aspect of a product's life cycle starting at source of materials to the manufacturing processes, transportation, and ending with what happens at the end of the product's life. With this expanded view of a product, design teams are presented with an endless number of opportunities to improve and thus create new products. The result is innovative new products that are more sustainable than their predecessors. In this article, we will first take a look at a product's life cycle to understand the many opportunities available for innovation. This includes outlining some questions, considerations and tools product teams might consider to facilitate the process. Then, we take a look at some companies and products already successfully integrating life cycle thinking into their product develop.


This article appeared in the August 2010 edition of Appliance Design Magazine.

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Fueling Innovation AD2010.pdf293.53 KB