Integration of sustainability into new product design

This dissertation examines the integration of sustainability into product design, mainly focusing on the environmental aspects. Product development is one of the most critical aspects for companies in reaching their sustainability objectives. However, the support needed for making sustainability related decisions are not systematically integrated in companies today. So, it is a necessity to create generic methods and tools that helps the integration of sustainability aspects in decision making and product development. The main objective of this thesis is to understand how and what companies are doing currently to integrate sustainability into their products and product design processes. We intend to identify the gap between the literature and the practice in order to help researchers to develop a modified or a new method of integrating sustainability criterions into the product development processes that fill the existing gap. To pursue this aim, an explorative research has been implemented through the use of an on-line survey proposed to over 200 companies, of which only 10 companies responded. In order to increase the relevance of the entire work, further 3 case studies including face to face interviews and analyzing the internal documents had been done. The survey and cases revealed that sustainability is not well integrated into product design yet and is not the primary concern for R&D studies of companies. Ecodesign improvement options only stand a chance, if they are supported by some stimuli related to economical aspects apart from just environmental benefits. So, it is not likely that a company will make a choice that is not primarily economically driven. In addition, companies mostly think ecodesign as achieving long term objectives. In reality, most of the decisions and interest depend on either costs or long term plans as image improvement and entering to new markets. The output of this paper will help those who want to pursue a research in the area, to include sustainability dimension in product development course, and for those companies who are interested to understand and adopt tools and methods that is suitable for their company.