Page 123 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

102 Cha pte r Se v e n

It is important, however, to avoid the trap of treating environmen-
tal sustainability as a separate dimension of performance. The “triple
bottom line” metaphor encourages an unfortunate separation of
sustainability into environmental, economic, and social dimensions.
When measuring environmental perfor-
mance, the majority of manufacturing firms
THE ENVIRONMENTAL,
tend to focus on conventional environmental,
ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL
health and safety indicators (emissions, inci-
DIMENSIONS OF
dents, etc.) associated with manufacturing
SUSTAINABILITY ARE
operations, and do not address shareholder
CLOSELY INTERTWINED.
or stakeholder value creation. Yet, the three
dimensions are closely intertwined; for exam-
ple, waste elimination efforts may simultaneously result in environ-
mental enhancement, operating cost reduction, and human health
improvement.
Ideally, sustainability goals should be woven into the existing
managerial decision making, monitoring, and reward systems that
drive continuous improvement. This is why the GRI Guidelines men-
tioned in Chapter 3, while helpful for public reporting of sustainabil-
ity performance, are less useful for internal performance management.
For cross-functional product development teams, careful selection of
environmental performance metrics will help assure that the product
design strategy is consistent with enterprise goals.
A powerful and practical indicator concept that combines envi-
ronmental performance with economic value creation is eco-efficiency,
first introduced by the World Business Council for Sustainable
Development. Eco-efficiency can be defined as the ratio of product/
service value delivered to the environmental burdens of product/
service creation or consumption [3]. Eco-efficiency metrics are com-
monly used in product development; for example:
• General Motors has measured eco-efficiency in terms of “re -
source productivity,” e.g., number of vehicles produced per
kilowatt-hour of energy used, gallon of water used, or ton of
greenhouse gas emitted.
• Sony calculates the economic value added over the lifetime
of its batteries and divides it by the sum of the nonrecyclable
material consumed and energy used in production.
• DuPont encourages its businesses to substitute intellectual
capital for physical capital by measuring product perfor-
mance in terms of shareholder value added per pound of
product sold; this favors technology-based businesses over
high-volume commodities.*
*Not surprisingly, DuPont divested its petrochemical business in 1999 and its
nylon business in 2002.