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Sustainable product design

Our overarching ambition is to ensure that our products create value for our stakeholders during their life cycle and beyond. To offer a truly sustainable alternative accompanied by validated data, we consider all sustainability parameters from the very earliest stages of product development.

Our Sustainable Product Design concept

Our Sustainable Product Design concept supports and steers our product development projects, promoting a sustainable product life cycle approach and ensuring that every new product and service we design has a proven sustainability value proposition. Our concept also guarantees that we support the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

We focus on identifying the customer’s or consumer’s problem and solving it. To find the optimal solution to every sustainability challenge of products life cycle – both environmental and social – the collaboration with the customer is to be initiated early in the design phase.

Our concept is based on the British Design Council’s ‘double diamond’ framework. It is a result of a deep dive into different design thinking approaches. To us this framework provides a lens to look holistically at the whole product development process.

Phases of design process

The Sustainable Design Concept consists of two phases and provides a holistic lens to examine the entire product life cycle.

First, we focus on investigating and defining the customer’s or consumer’s problem and finding the best solution. To address every sustainability challenge across a product’s life cycle—both environmental and social—collaboration with the customer should begin early in the design phase.
In the second phase the focus is on the ideation, development, and delivery of the solution.

The concept can be further divided to four distinct stages:

Discover

At this stage, we focus on trends, markets, and regulatory developments. These factors serve as key inputs, helping us understand customer needs and ultimately enabling us to develop sustainable solutions that create value for stakeholders and society.

Define

This stage focuses on analyzing and synthesizing the information we have collected. The outcome of the Define stage is a preliminary sustainable value proposition, which helps set a clear target for upcoming product development work.

Develop

This stage involves generating ideas for possible solutions, as well as prototyping and testing mock-ups. Here, we also analyze data to support the defined sustainability value proposition and guide the next steps of the process.

Deliver

In this stage, we produce, scale up, and test the final solution. By the end of the process, we deliver a proven solution, complete with a validated sustainability value proposition and supporting credentials for the customer.

Six steps of sustainable product life cycle

The main drivers for designing sustainable products and services are regulation, trends and markets, but also impacts on people – specifically from a usability and well-being point of view. We listen to our customers’ goals and drivers, closely follow markets, trends and regulatory development, and combine these insights with our know-how about sustainable raw materials and production technologies. Based on what we learn from each other, we formulate common sustainability goals.

Our approach is divided into six life cycle steps. We strive to exclusively utilize safe and responsibly sourced raw materials, improve production efficiency, optimize distribution, as well as support sustainable consumption, recyclability and circularity. We have several tools to help evaluate sustainability factors of each life cycle steps throughout the design process.

Each step comprizes a variety of elements that guide our product development process. Our products have diverse applications, and our customers are engaged in different parts of the value chain. This means the relevance of different life cycle steps and their specific elements may vary from business to business.

Our commitments by 2030

Developing new products and services that contribute to the UN SDGs

100%

Strategic, critical and high sustainability risk supplier spend covered by EcoVadis assessment indicating low sustainability risk

100%

fibre certified

-30%

reduction of CO₂ emissions from materials and logistics (from 2018 level)

-65%

reduction of fossil CO₂ emissions from own combustion and purchased electricity (from 2015 level)

fatalities or serious accidents

total recordable injury frequency (TRIF) including contractors

process waste sent to landfills or to incineration without energy recovery

100%

applicable products eligible for ecolabeling

UPM’s 2030 sustainability targets

Our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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