Assessment of product concepts

1 Goal Definition

As by other projects it is also important to define the goals when performing environmental assessment of products or product concepts.

This is done in order to assure that the work described in the following sections is compatible to the goals in terms of relevance and in terms of the extent of the allocated resources.

The costs to perform the environmental assessment are (of course) related to the level of the ambition of the goals. This is illustrated by the examples below (The cost increase as you move down through the table):


Purpose of the environmental assessment Intended audience
Sound out the situation Internal
Compare the environmental impacts of new design alternatives against a previous generation of the product Internal
Use the results for environmental claims for marketing purposes External
Performing environmental declarations according to ISO 14021 (Type II) or to obtain an ecolabel according to ISO 14024 (Type I) External
Performing an environmental declaration according to ISO 14025 /TR (type III) certified by an independent 3rd party. External

In order to ease the formulation of the goals it might help to start finding the answers of the questions below. Depending on the size of your company, the diversification of its products and its level of experience in integrated product policy you can choose to deal with the questions covering the entire company, a part of the company or a specific product or type of products.

Task 1.1:

Does the company have an overall environmental policy in which is referred to the environmental impact of its products, and if so please explain?

Has the company received any enquires from customers (or potential customers) concerning the environmental performance of its products, and if so please explain?

Has there been set up any targets for the environmental performance of products, and if so please explain? This issue might have been dealt with in relation to coping with section 4.3.1.in the ISO 14001 that concerns “Environmental aspects”.

ISO 14001:1996 "Environmental management systems - Specification with guidance for use", Sub clause 4.3.1 states:

The organization shall establish and maintain (a) procedure(s) to identify the environmental aspects of its activities, products or services that it can control and over which it can be expected to have an influence, in order to determine those which have or can have significant impact on the environment. The organization shall ensure that the aspects related to these significant impacts are considered in setting its environmental objectives.

The organization shall keep this information up-to-date.

What is the general purpose of performing environmental assessment of the particular case-product ?

Having coped with these questions it should (hopefully?) be possible to define the goal by answering the question:


Task 1.2:

What is the goal of performing environmental assessment specifically for the concept design of this case-product, and to whom will the results be communicated?