Measuring the environmental performance of new products: an integrated approach

Environmental awareness and legislation are pushing manufacturers to introduce new ‘green’ products that, during their whole life cycle, have a low impact on the state of natural resources. Unfortunately, it is not completely clear how accounting information, physical measures and qualitative information, expressing the effects of each product development initiative, can be structured to support decision making. The paper is aimed at designing an integrated approach that takes both tangible and intangible effects into consideration and starting from the available information, suggests different decisional tools according to the decision maker's objective. In particular, at an earlier stage the paper defines an operating framework for the identification of significant evaluation criteria to support decision making on programmes aimed at introducing new ‘green’ products. At a later stage, the paper analyses whether different managers' environment related priorities require distinct types of data to be included in the selection procedure and hence suggest the most effective evaluation technique within different decisional contexts.