We share almost 40 strategies that can help you design products with a lower environmental impact from the IEC 62430:2019 standard for environmentally conscious product design.

Greener manufacturing is increasing in popularity and being driven forward by associated legislation. If you start with a lifecycle assessment to find your business and product’s key areas to improve environmental impact, following some of the most relevant strategies below could benefit you a great deal in terms of reducing your operational costs, winning the trust and business of customers, and being a greener force that helps to harm the planet and environment less!

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Introduction: why are we talking about environmentally conscious product design and sustainability?

This is not really about taking an existing product design and making it more sustainable, rather, we’re discussing how to bake ‘sustainability and lower environmental impact’ into the design from the beginning.

The context to discussing greener product design here focuses on two points:

1. Legislation: A lot of products claim to be green today, but greenwashing is unfortunately very common these days, and legislation is also coming in that will make it illegal to make green claims without providing concrete evidence for them. An example would be a company that claims it uses recycled materials and is therefore ‘green’, but it actually only uses a small percentage of recycled material in the packaging and, to make matters worse, it flies the products to market by air.

2. Market demand: Consumers are already becoming more environmentally conscious, and the frameworks for them to check a product’s impact, such as the EU product passport which makes environmental impacts more transparent, are starting to come into action or will be soon. Some businesses are already embracing this and designing products with lower environmental impacts, or even those that are made to go into the circular economy and the plan is there for them to be recycled and reused at the end of their lifetime from the very start (cradle to cradle design approach).

Therefore, the following design approaches will enable you to create a truly green product if it’s important for your customers and your business for you to be a more responsible global player. (00:00)

Good product design practices for bringing to market products with a lower environmental impact from IEC 62430:2019.

The IEC is similar to ISO (famously known for ISO 9001 among other standards) and can be quite technical and is focused on electrical, electronic, and similar products. In this case, their standard IEC 62430:2019 provides a useful framework for ‘Environmentally conscious design’ that can give you a lot of ideas. This standard could be used to hold a design to work in a certain way, for example, but we’re interested in the examples of product-related environmental improvement strategies that can be found in Appendix A2 which build a reduced environmental impact into the product during its design and development phases in order to minimize negative effects as much as possible during the product’s lifecycle.

There are 5 categories, and we will go through the environmentally conscious product design strategies for each and make some comments on them:

1. Design for material sourcing

2. Design for manufacture

• Reduce energy consumption
• Reduce consumption of natural resources, e.g. water
• Reduce process waste
• Use internally recovered or recycled materials from process waste
• Reduce emissions to air, water and soil during manufacture
• Consider reducing number of parts
• Reduce use of hazardous process chemicals (e.g. volatile solvents) (24:44)

3. Design for transport and distribution

• Minimize product size and weight
• Optimize shape and volume for maximum packing density
• Optimize transport/distribution in relation to energy efficiency and emissions
• In concert with choice of transportation used, maximize reuse of packaging where possible Reduce embodied energy in packaging
• Use packaging that emits low or zero VOCs
• Increase use of recycled materials in packaging
• Increase the sharing rate (ride share options) of commuting cars (30:45)

4. Design for use (including installation and maintenance)

5. Design for end of life

• Restrict use of substances classified as hazardous
• Maximize the ability to reuse and recycle components and materials, e.g. by design for disassembly
• Minimize design aspects detrimental to reuse and recycling e.g. mixtures of materials
• Reduce amount of residual waste generated
• Reduce energy required for disassembly and recycling
• Reduce water required for disassembly and recycling (51:23)

Why importers need to start thinking about and planning for more sustainable products right now

With legislation like the ESPR coming into action in the EU, for example, importers will need to increasingly be thinking about environmentally conscious product design. It might make sense to identify the areas where your product will have the greatest environmental impact by doing a lifecycle assessment, and then focus on reducing or eliminating those key areas of impact.

A lifecycle assessment will be more effective for new products rather than those already on the market because it allows you to take its learnings into the next iterations of your products or your totally new ones.

Another benefit that should be noted is that aside from legislation, customers are now demanding greener and more efficient products. In Europe, for sure, there is a lot more marketing focused on energy efficiency, and many of these approaches drive product design towards using less energy and resources.

Also, manufacturers need to know, that creating an environmentally conscious design often reduces costs, be they in the factory, or in terms of materials and components used to produce the products.

Related content…

• IEC 62430:2019 for ‘Environmentally conscious design’
• What is the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation?
• Designing New Products With A Cradle To Cradle Cycle In Mind
• The Design for X Approach: 12 Common Examples
• How To Do an LCA? (Measuring a Product’s Environmental Impact)
• 23 Ideas For Producing More Eco-Friendly Products