Sustainable Product Design
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Eighty percent of a product’s environmental impacts are determined in the product design phase. Once you formulate a liquid product and commit to providing it in a plastic bottle, for example, you have dramatically limited your sustainability options to tinkering with the type of plastic, its weight, size, recycled content and a small number of other factors. At this point, it’s too late to consider concentrating the liquid or selling the product in a powder form.
Pure Strategies provides customers with tools to help them evaluate options in the product design stage-gate process.
- Phase Zero Design Questions at the earliest point in the process prompt thinking about the sustainability of various materials, supply issues, disposal options, and other factors relevant to your product.
- A Product Category LCA identifies materials, carbon, and energy hot spots.
- Chemical Hazards Analyses evaluate chemical hazards throughout the supply chain and address an area LCA analyses don’t thoroughly evaluate.
Using these tools, Pure Strategies builds a product-specific scorecard that provides a quantitative measure of the effect of each design improvement. The tool gives designers a feedback loop to guide them through various product iterations. Designers can score the product based on a variety of factors - toxics or energy use, for example — that are uniquely relevant to that product.
Case Study:
Seventh Generation Materials Scorecard
Pure Strategies developed a materials scorecard to help Seventh Generation with the highly complex task of selecting more sustainable ingredients and packaging materials. This tool enables product designers to objectively score different product formulations and materials and evaluate trade-offs based on human health criteria and other sustainability issues.
Pure Strategies employed standard acute and chronic toxicity exposure data for human health, and life cycle inventory data for environmental and resource impacts as indicators for the scoring system. Designers can use the resulting scores to compare different formulations of the same product or different products. The Product Scorecard gives the company’s research and development staff a valuable tool to test innovative designs and materials for future products.