Page 31 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

10 Cha pte r O n e

Moreover, companies are increasingly working with suppliers, cus-
tomers, and external stakeholders to design sustainable solutions. This
book describes the exciting opportunities that are made possible by
this collaborative, enterprise-wide approach.

DFE Implementation Challenges
A newfound passion for sustainability has led many companies to set
aggressive environmental performance goals and issue glossy reports
extolling their commitment to environmental and social responsibil-
ity. But veteran companies that have walked this path for years real-
ize that putting these concepts into practice in a way that genuinely
transforms a business is not as simple as it may appear. It is relatively
easy to “pick the low-hanging fruit” by adopting best practices such
as low-energy lighting systems and recovery of post-industrial scrap.
With a bit more effort, companies can implement ISO 14001-style
environmental management systems and measure their con tinuous
improvement in performance. A much greater challenge is to inte-
grate sustainability thinking into a company’s business processes to
achieving significant, lasting change. In particular, to perform Design
for Environment consistently and effectively is challenging for sev-
eral reasons:
• The necessary environmental expertise is not widely avail-
able among product development teams, including market-
ers and engineers.
• The complex and open-ended nature of environmental phe-
nomena makes it difficult to analyze the effects of design
improvement.
• The economic systems in which products are pro duced, used,
and recycled are much more difficult to understand and con-
trol than the products themselves.
Despite the many examples of successful DFE efforts described
in this book, the current state of DFE practice can be characterized as
mainly opportunistic. Well-motivated and well-informed teams may
be able to identify product improvements that are environmentally
beneficial or that reduce life-cycle costs. However, in order to imple-
ment DFE fully as a component of the new product development pro-
cess, systematic methods and processes must be introduced and
integrated into the daily work of development teams. Much of this
book is devoted to describing these methods, including stage-gate pro-
cesses, design guidelines, performance metrics, and analytical tools.
Finally, it is important to position DFE correctly in the broader
context of corporate innovation and social responsibility. As de scribed
in Chapter 4, those companies that consistently deliver shareholder
value combine a relentless drive for technological superiority with