Designing products sustainably

Our overarching ambition is to ensure that our products create value for our stakeholders during their lifecycle 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 supports and steers our product development projects, promoting a sustainable product lifecycle 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 lifecycle – 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 lifecycle. 

The main drivers for designing sustainable products and services are regulation, trends and markets, but also impacts on people – specifically from a usability and wellbeing 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 and a vision towards a future beyond fossils.

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

Each step comprises 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 lifecycle steps and their specific elements may vary from business to business.

Development of new products and services with contribution to the UN SDGs