The integration of sustainability into highly uncertain technology development is key to support manufacturing companies to reduce their environmental impacts. The use of future scenarios to support decision-making in early design for sustainability is promising, but there is a lack of systematic guidelines on how to build them. Through literature review and empirical research scenario-building guidelines were designed. The guidelines are step-by-step activities to be performed in workshops. Results suggest the guidelines were successful in building consistent, plausible, and useful scenarios.

The growing use of additive manufacturing (AM) processes pushes research towards studying methods to reduce their environmental impact. The part build orientation is a significant process variable, which can be chosen through the Energy Performance Assessment (EPA), a straightforward method. The paper presents a method for identifying the best part build orientation considering energy consumption. The EPA has been adapted for this purpose, resulting in an approach based on four steps. The method was employed to determine the best printing direction for three parts and two AM technologies.

Manufacturing firms are facing the critical need to manage their business growth while staying within the biophysical limits of the planet. Absolute environmental sustainability decoupling (AESD) combines these goals and is one of the keys for manufacturing firms to achieve their sustainable transition. This study offers an initial contribution to categorise decoupling at the firm level while incorporating absolute environmental sustainability goals. It also explores the role of design in achieving AESD and opens doors for further research on manufacturing firms' sustainability transition.

Sustainable Product Development (SPD) enables the systematic incorporation of sustainability into product development and can be achieved by implementing a number of management practices. An industry survey was conducted to investigate the capability of manufacturing companies to apply a consolidated set of 61 SPD management practices. The results indicate that despite the high interest for SPD, the uptake of SPD practices in industry is still behind the state-of-the-art literature. Hence, a greater improvement opportunity exists in the industrial uptake in SPD.

Trade-offs involving multiple criteria that cannot be satisfied at the same time are ubiquitous in engineering design activities. Navigating trade-off decisions can be challenging, especially when it comes to sustainability-related decisions in early-stage projects. Through a systematic literature review, we unravel the challenges related to sustainability trade-offs in technology development, concept design, and other front-end of innovation activities. The challenges, which were evaluated by experts from industry and academia, range from technical and organisational to psychological aspects.

Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs) develop and transfer new technologies to industry. Considering environnemental and social challenges in their activities is becoming more and more important. Integrating these challenges within an organization requires a global and coherent method, but also flexibility to adapt to the various activities of the organisationz. Eco-innovation is an approach that can meet these goals. However, literature has already shown that the main obstacles for the integration of eco-innovation come from the lack of global approaches adapted to companies' practices. In this paper, we characterise the specific activities of RTOs. Then, we specified the need for an eco innovation approach for RTOs. We carried out a functional analysis to formalise the need and identify the main functions that the eco-innovation approach must fulfil. We conducted exploratory interviews with various stakholders from an RTO in order to validate the identified needs and functions.

Sustainable Product Development (SPD) has been gaining increased attention in academia, industry, and policy. Over the past three decades, significant progress has been observed in incorporation of environmental issues into the product development process, through the so-called ecodesign management practices. Nevertheless, systematisation of the SPD practices, which simultaneously consider the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability, is still missing. To address this gap, this research aims to identify the existing SPD management practices in the academic literature, with special focus on how sustainability dimensions are currently being considered, their coverage in relation to key knowledge areas for product development and their applicability across the SPD phases. Through a systematic literature review, 362 practices were identified and further classified according to a classification criteria. While environmental considerations are still the most prominent ones, the research highlights the importance of the early stages of product development for SPD, as well as the key knowledge areas which are currently being covered by the practices, such as sustainability evaluation and sustainability improvement.

The replacement of conventional material with recyclates affects product personality, particularly regarding sustainability aspects influencing consumer behaviour. A definition of personality for products made of recyclates is missing in literature. As these products require appropriate aesthetics based on material origin to communicate the advantage concerning sustainability, there is a need for research in this regard. This paper aims to develop an adequate personality of a reusable water bottle made of ocean plastic by collecting personality traits that evoke associations related to the material's origin and sustainability. We conducted two quantitative field studies. Study 1 collected associated visual perceived attributes and context-related personality traits in order to develop and visualize a preliminary design. Study 2 evaluated the design regarding associated personality traits. The overall outcome was a product personality scale consisting of 23 items plus a concrete design recommendation for a water bottle made of recycled ocean plastic. The assessment of degree of sustainability was strongly influenced by participants’ associations with personal use, familiarity with usage and the factor of stability and resilience.

At the end of its life the packaging may become a residue if it is not correctly discarded, becoming a visible component of the waste produced on the planet, with a defined shape and communicating with the world. In the same way, large-scale agricultural production generates organic residues that, although representing fiber-rich materials, are discarded, such as rice husk, coconut husk, wood fibers, among others. To contribute with solutions to minimize the environmental impact of packaging and organic residues, the present study aims at performing preliminary tests of molded pulp packaging manufacturing from organic residues, in a circular economy context. Action research was used as the method to guide the collective construction (project team and partner companies), and the direction of the preliminary tests of packaging to be manufactured. The tests performed on coconut fibers in transfer molding and thermoforming were promising, but they required the addition of binder substances like byproducts from starch, especially in the transfer molding method. Besides using fibers from alternative sources to cellulose, the proposed packaging is potentially compostable and may replace non-renewable material like oil-based polymers.

The practice-led research focuses on how agro-waste can be used to build a structure, gather relevant knowledge, and identify its various challenges. Based on the compressive strength of Bio-Bricks, it was decided to use a frame structure, and instead of using Bio-Bricks as a modular unit, the material used was cast in situ with the help of a specially designed mould. The roofing of the structure was also built using Bio-Bricks material over an MS frame. The prototype was plastered with cement mortar and finished with two coats of distemper paint. After the completion of the prototype structure, comprehensive documentation was done to analyse the data generated from the process to identify the desired improvements. A secondary study of sustainable building materials was done to understand the comparative strength and weaknesses of Bio-Bricks as construction materials. Based on the work done at different stages of construction, detailed lists of findings and inferences were drawn to improve the overall manufacturing process. The research project findings will help guide the future development of Bio-Bricks as a commercial building material.

In the EU, initiatives with concrete instruments for measuring and storing sustainability-related product data are now introduced in legislation. Based on literature review and semi-structured interviews, this study investigates two EU instruments, the Product Environmental Footprint method and Digital Product Passports, and their potential implications for company capabilities to design and select more sustainable solutions in a strategic way. The results show that these instruments can lead to increased transparency and traceability in the design and comparison of solutions, allowing for more effective collaboration across the value chain. By applying a strategic sustainability perspective, it was found that these EU instruments have major limitations as they lack a systems perspective, do not include a full socio-ecological sustainability perspective, and do not support strategic decision-making. This results in risks for suboptimization and the design of solutions that turn out to be costly dead-ends on the way towards a sustainable society. Research is therefore recommended to investigate how these instruments can facilitate a strategic development of sustainable solutions.

The climate change and the new regulations imposed to slow down this process have pushed major actors around the world to apply sustainable measures in order to meet governmental obligations. The packaging industry has a major role in fighting climate change and the environmental social and financial disasters. In fact, packaging requires substantial number of natural resources and is often disposed of in ways that harm the environment. Supply chain managers realized that packaging design is the root to solve all the problems packages create throughout their entire life cycle. Therefore, a thorough study about influencing the design process should be prioritized. This paper provides a systematic review of industrial packaging eco-design applied to the supply chain. It aims to conceptualize the definition of industrial packaging eco-design and supply chain sustainability to categorize main parameters to its implementation and to identify the limitations of current research and its prospects.

During coronavirus time, academic organisations and education institutions have been faced to amazing and radical changes from one day to the other of their teaching contexts, practices, materials and standards and so on. Due to pandemic, in many countries professors, teachers, educators have been obliged to switch on remote education and teaching models with numerous virtual and digital solutions that at the beginning were more or less efficient and professional based. The paper will present a experiment feedback for large hybridation of technology and engineering curriculum for bachelor degree in French higher education system. The educational content and platform has been developed by the consortium of 14 different universities and higher education institutions. In the global topics covered by the project, a specific focus will be given in the paper on subject dealing with engineering design, systems engineering and sustainanibility.

Sharing information between stakeholders is a critical success factor for ecodesign projects. This sharing is based on indicators that can be interrelated, i.e., impacting each other.

This article focuses on the perception of environmental performance indicators’ relationships during the design phase of projects. It uses a DEMATEL approach combined with a graph-database visualization linking environmental performance indicators. While the DEMATEL approach highlights the critical environmental indicators, the graph-based visualization maps the primary interrelations of these factors and defines the best scale to manage them. The novelty here lies in the complementary use of these two methods to facilitate environmental project monitoring.

This research is applied to rail infrastructure projects. The main results insist on land optimization, landscape insertion, carbon footprint, economic benefits, and biodiversity measures as critical factors when designing these projects. The graph-based visualization maps the main oriented links between indicators, allowing managers to identify the gaps between the perceived knowledge and the ground truth, facilitating their project monitoring.

The sustainable design transition has proven to be a challenging process, in part due to the diverse set of stakeholders, which includes the general public, policymakers, scientific researchers, and businesses. In prior work, the interconnected relationships among systematic drivers and barriers for sustainable design were identified and mapped using a causal loop diagram at a relatively abstract level. To further understand and characterize this complex system, this research aims to identify the relationship strength levels among the variables in the system, as indicated by previous research identified in the literature. In addition, the knowledge maturity levels of these identified relationships are specified to illustrate strengths and gaps in the literature. The findings are used to create a refined system representation that illustrates the power dynamics between systemic driving forces to sustainable design transitions. The results of this work reveal valuable insights about the linkages among the driving forces of sustainable design transitions that can be used as a foundation for further investigation, such as experiments and data analytics that can better quantify these relationships.

Today, eco-innovation is a major challenge for companies. This new innovation approach requires to renew current practices to meet new societal and environmental issues. To do this, more and more companies create innovation laboratories to support them in this process, by providing different tools and methods adapted to their needs. To integrate eco-innovation in these new spaces, tools must answer to differents criteria. The only tool proposed by the literature is the guidelines tool but by confronting it with current practices, limits of this tool and of the innovation laboratory practices were defined. In this paper we will question and deconstruct guidelines tool in order to propose a new vision of it through identification of eco-innovation attributes.

Packaging of potatoes, vegetables and fruits (PVF) currently deals with the fragile opposition of food waste reduction and packaging resource consumption. In order to understand how designers can rethink this always negative balance and outcome of waste creation, research was done to understand packaging and preservation of PVFs from both a technological and consumer perspective. A mixed research approach was applied, including literature study, expert interviews, packaging analyses, consumer survey and photo study. In sum, we concluded that the main function of packaging is preservation, including both protection from outside influences and conservation in best possible conditions. Optimal preservation should consider each PVF's respiration and transpiration needs, and ethylene sensitivity. Consumers are mostly not aware of correct preservation methods. However, on the other hand, their awareness evokes an important tendency to ban plastics without considering their positive impact on food preservation. In the paper, design opportunities are formulated for new reusable packaging, reducing waste creation and offering higher quality in food preservation and consumer experience.

While innovation in waste treatment processes continue to advance, plastics are still often put aside in comparison to other materials. It is especially the case for WEEE-plastics: as they are included in complex equipment, their recovery is disregarded, in aid of critical metals and rare earths. The recycling of plastics is hindered by the low re-integration rate of these materials, due to concerns around their quality and their availability. Ecodesign of EEE thus seems to be a robust solution. This paper details two approaches to assess product design, by respectively evaluating the product recyclability and the implementation of predefined ecodesign guidelines. Based on these methods, the construction of a quality standard for recycled plastics in France is presented. The definition of the quality includes mechanical properties, but chemical, logistics, and regulatory aspects are also at stake. Eventually, ecodesign indexes and indicators are selected, and a method for their formal construction is proposed. The goal of this study is to provide ways to assess the overall quality and usability of recycled plastics, along with design for circularity methods to integrate them in new manufactured products.

The defense industry tends to anticipate environmental issues through eco-design integration in the overall design process. This leads to focus on the impact of technological and design choices of complex systems while maximizing operational performance. Such development involves long and complex processes and is constrained in a project owner and industrial project manager context. In this context poorly described in the literature, the objective of this paper is to identify barriers and drivers to achieve an efficient application of eco-design. A comprehensive analysis of the interactions and the current design processes is performed in the context of the French defense industry. Through internal documentation and semi-structured interviews with the key actors, the generic design process of a project owner is analysed (including relationships with industrial project manager). The failure modes that currently limit the integration of eco-design in projects are also identified.