Design for environmental sustainability: collect and use company information to design green products

Environmental policy has paid more and more attention to the impact of products and their life cycle, by establishing goals to be reached very shortly. Decisions at the design stage have a significant impact on the downstream activities, easing or making them difficult, although these take place at a very later time. The paper presents an approach to include in the traditional design process environmental sustainability aspects next to functional and economic drivers. Its novelty stands in the support for companies to structure the acquired knowledge about sustainability; recently a growing number of industrial companies faced the environmental question, and now the problem is not related to the absence of environmental data, but to its effective capitalization and related scarce strategies to support and improve it. The method, starting from the company’s data and information, identifies the best strategies to simplify and effectively support the decision-making process. In this way, it not only allows the designers to take advantage of the information coming from product life cycle phases but also it makes possible to lower the environmental impact of a product through their decisions. The output of the method consists of charts, maps, and graphical materials; using them designers can compare, in environmental terms, design alternatives. Different combinations can be analyzed and interpolated to select the best design combinations. The implementation in an industrial case of the method and its output allow its applicability and validation. Starting from environmental data collected by the company over the years, usually used by the marketing department, a critical review has been carried out to derive, from them, useful tools to be used during design choices.