Improve Products & Services

Life Cycle Thinking

This guide explains how life cycle thinking and mapping help you identify and better understand the potential impacts of your products and services on people and the environment. By exploring environmental and social impacts from your raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to customer use, and end of life, you can identify hot spots and leverage points to take action on.

Case Study: StemCell Technologies uses lifecycle conceptual mapping

Learn more about how StemCell Technologies used our guide to identify actual, potential, and external levers to improve product development.

Life Cycle Assessment

Our forthcoming guide on life cycle assessments help you understand the social and environmental impacts of your products or services. This guide explains what a life cycle assessment is, why your business might want to undertake one, and what to know about the process before you reach out to an LCA consultant.

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What is the Circular Economy?

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation provides a range of videos, audio files, case studies, and slides that can help you to understand the limitations of our linear economy, the aspects and benefits of a circular approach to industry, and the principles that can enable businesses and communities to achieve a more sustainable economy.

Recycled Materials Guide

This simple guide from Google provides helpful and inspiring insights into how they have approached recycled materials and solutions they have used in their products. This includes insights related to post consumer mechanically recycled polycarbonate; post industrial, chemically recycled polybutylene terephthalate; recycled polyester in softgoods; recycled aluminum and stainless steel; and recycled critical minerals. This guide will be especially beneficial to sustainability, R&D, operations, and engineering professionals.

What is Sustainable Innovation?

This article provides a high-level explanation of what sustainable innovation looks like when designing products and services and how it differs from traditional innovation. This resource is a good introduction on how businesses can make innovation sustainable, and can help you to understand why this matters.

Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessment

This comprehensive handbook outlines a method for analysing the social impacts of a product across its entire life cycle. It presents a number of indicators you can use to make impacts more visible and potentially identify hotspots, risks, and opportunities for improvement. It was developed by The Roundtable for Product Social Metrics, a business-led working group that works in collaboration with academia, NGOs, government, and industry organisations.

Solar Impulse Foundation

This database showcases thousands of solutions for improving the sustainability of operations, products, and services. The curated database allows you to filter for solutions by sector, client profile, application, geography, and more, and the solution profiles highlight the potential environmental and financial benefits. This is a good one-stop shop for technology experts, engineers, operations managers, change agents, and leaders to explore the growing range of innovations that can support their sustainability-related projects and objectives.

Consumer Hardware Carbon Reduction Guide

This short guide from Google can help you to improve the carbon footprint of your products. It outlines a four-step approach for finding carbon hotspots at the product and company level; getting the most actionable data; and working with all internal and external partners to reduce those hotspots.

Although the focus of this guide is on consumer electronics, the lessons are applicable to a much broader range of manufactured goods.

Okala EcoDesign Wheel App

This "brainstorming tool" is a great prompt for early thinking on improving the sustainability of a product or service. Taken from the Okala Practitioner Guide, it organises different strategies for minimising ecological impact around the stages of the product life-cycle.

The Roadmap to Sustainable E-commerce

This report from EDF+Business encourages consumer goods retailers to share more information on the social and environmental impacts of their products. Intended for businesses that engage in both direct and indirect e-commerce, the report explains how retailers can leverage their influence to improve product transparency and buyer behavour. The report outlines seven steps to achieving e-commerce sustainability leadership, with each section referencing relevant guidance and toolkits to help you get started.