Sure. You can look at this from a chronological perspective as well as a philosophical perspective. The challenge is that many of the terms used never had solid definitions, i.e. not everybody meaning the same thing used the same term, and not everybody using the same term meant the same thing. However, you could say that in design there was first a development to focus on environmental aspects dominantly (up to mid 1990s), an approach often termed 'design for environment'. Next step was to balance environment with economic considerations, often termed ecodesign. Next step was also including social issues (roughly from 2000 on-wards) resulting in 'Design for sustainability'. All three are basically resulting from an ideal to 'do more with less', i.e. eco-efficiency, which was the industry response to the Brundtland definition of sustainable development. Parallel to the eco-efficiency development there were different philosophical developments, such as the natural step, cradle-to-cradle and biomimicry. At the moment the momentum seems to be with 'circular economy' which aims to combine many of these earlier approaches and insights.

Sure. You can look at this from a chronological perspective as well as a philosophical perspective. The challenge is that many of the terms used never had solid definitions, i.e. not everybody meaning the same thing used the same term, and not everybody using the same term meant the same thing. However, you could say that in design there was first a development to focus on environmental aspects dominantly (up to mid 1990s), an approach often termed 'design for environment'. Next step was to balance environment with economic considerations, often termed ecodesign. Next step was also including social issues (roughly from 2000 on-wards) resulting in 'Design for sustainability'. All three are basically resulting from an ideal to 'do more with less', i.e. eco-efficiency, which was the industry response to the Brundtland definition of sustainable development. Parallel to the eco-efficiency development there were different philosophical developments, such as the natural step, cradle-to-cradle and biomimicry. At the moment the momentum seems to be with 'circular economy' which aims to combine many of these earlier approaches and insights.

A very practical approach to this question will be researched within the ISR under the terms of questioning the use of "Green Packaging", more on this soon.

I ALSO agree with Vasco.

Product design and development is a straight forward process and inclusion of environmental engineering is now part of it. Please see the following ISO documents (1, 2, 3, 4) for the purpose. Once the product design is completed in the 3D CAD environment, it is possible to utilize specialized databases such as Simapro (http://www.pre-sustainability.com/simapro-lca-software), GABI (http://www.gabi-software.com/america/overview/product-sustainability-performance/), and Ecoinvent (http://www.ecoinvent.org/home/), to provide a method to evaluate the total inventory and impact based on LCA and can generate the necessary reports. Similarly SolidWorks Sustainability (http://www.solidworks.com/sustainability/sustainability-software.htm) provides actionable environmental results by measuring the environmental impacts of individual designs across the product life cycle, including the effects of material, manufacturing, assembly, and transportation based on standard databases. Similar products are available from other major CAD vendors as well.

[1] ISO, 2002, TR 14062 (2002), Environmental Management—Integrating Environmental Aspects Into Product Design and Development, International Standards Organization.

[2] ISO, 2006, ISO 14040 (2006), Environmental Management–Life Cycle Assessment– Principles and Framework, International Standards Organization.

[3] ISO 14044 (2006): Environmental management - Life cycle assessment -Requirements and guidelines, International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), Geneve

[4] Fabio Giudice, Guido La Rosa, and Antonio Risitano, (2006) Product design for the environment: a life cycle approach, CRC/Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton

Conference Paper SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING – PRINCIPLES, APPLICATIONS AND DIRECTIONS

I agree with Nageswara and complement that sustainable product design has to be integrated with packaging design.

Conference Paper Product - Packaging Development Process: A Proposal Oriented...

Although I agree with most of the comments above, I would like to add one particular consideration that is too often forgotten in discussing all aspects of the assessment of environmental impact. Regional differences in both the generation of energy, in production practices, recycling etc. are often important and have not been mentioned. In my part of Canada for instance almost all electricity is hydro-generated, and can hardly be compared with coal or atomic energy that has a much higher impact. In fact even hydro-generated electricity has not the same environmental impact, depending on the distance to the user, the kind of growth or lack of it in the inundated areas, secondary effect like displacement of the population, impact on wildlife etc. Especially programs like the ones mentioned by Nageswara do not consider local or regional practices or legislation at all. One short example: legislation on the use of PVC varies and because of it the use of PET in packaging in general is either encouraged or limited to beverages. Because of the injection/blowing process of PET bottles the raw material requires a much higher melt than PET used in clamp or blister packs. Those are make by the extrusion/thermo-forming combination, a process that requires a low melt PET. Both materials carry the same recycling code and even the most sophisticated sorting equipment cannot detect the difference between the two. In some regions or countries this changes the recycling to down cycling. Similar situations in the supply of post consumer paper changes recycling of paper to composting. The trend to limit LCA (life cycle assessment) studies to regional studies and results seems part of the solution, but too often the project the designer is working on does not justify the cost of that kind of detailed studies. The complexity of supply lines also adds to the difficulties to make the scares information comparable. One would expect that most of the plastics produced in Canada be based on the extremely polluting tar sands oil from Alberta, yet almost all of them are based on north-sea oil. Although it seems an impossible task to make the difference between soon to come, high-risk arctic oil, tar sand oil, Middle East dictatorship oil, etc. in practice it is not as complicated as it seems. In fact the designer is in a position to initiate a flow of information by asking suppliers to be more specific about their materials. During my professional years I have made it a practice to ask suppliers for the origin of their materials and I would randomly call on the given sources to ask if that particular supplier was indeed a customer. Raw material suppliers that could not or would not answer those simple questions would be asked not to quote on the project. Sometimes they could not, but when asked a second time they would have all the information. The other real tool for designers is of course to specify materials that are completely or to a reasonable percentage recycled. It seems to me that one of the major problems is the lack of interest for environmental impact by designers. I am sure that a number of certifications in for instance wood exploitation would not exist anymore if designers would pay attention to the criteria by which these certifications are given…and some architects would be more sceptical towards the LEED certification to…Of course we have come a long way, but there are still a lot of hurdles. One of the main ones is of course that the designation “recyclable” should only be allowed when recycling is available.