QMS & EMS London

8. NEXT STEPS Now what? Given all of the information in this guide, it might be hard to figure out exactly what to do, or do differently, on the proverbial Monday morning. Developing your skill in sustainable design will take some time, but there are plenty of ways to put these tools and techniques into practice immediately.

7. COMMUNICATING THE RESULTS Product development is a process that touches many parts of an organization and its various partners and customers. Sustainable design can generate innovative and attractive solutions, but they may never see the light of day unless the features and benefits can be communicated effectively. This section outlines some ways to communicate the value of sustainable solutions to several of the major stakeholders involved with most products.

6. THE SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STRATEGIES Looking at impacts in the context of lifecycle stages is a good way to measure them, but not as helpful when actually designing or redesigning; after all, sustainable design strategies often affect more than one stage. Let’s look at a few of the strategies that Tom and Priscilla employed during their redesign processes.

The previous sections have laid out the context of sustainability and described how to know it when you see it. However, all of that information is irrelevant if it doesn't enable action—the point of assessing and reporting environmental impacts is to give you information on how design choices affect the relative sustainability of one product compared with other options. This section and the ones that follow show how to put all of that information into action.

4. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER While each of the three environmental assessment choices can be made independently to generate an impact assessment, there are several commonly used approaches. These techniques range from relatively quick, cheap, and low accuracy to much more expensive and time-consuming, but with more rigorous and robust results.