‘Product life cycle’ has gone from smart PR to smart business. Nowadays companies can’t ignore the importance of managing their products’ environmental footprints and Volvo Trucks was one of the first major industrial companies to turn its attention to reducing the environmental impact of its trucks.
From using ice-cold rivers to cool its plants to innovative alternative fuels – this is how Volvo stays on top of the life-cycle game.
It was about three years ago that the world reached a tipping point on climate concern. Green became the new black and everyone from politicians to pop stars started flaunting their environmental credentials. The business world was quick to seize upon this paradigm shift and businesses from chocolate makers to shipping companies started assessing the impact of their products on the environment, taking action to address that impact.
Of course companies in many sectors have shown varying levels of environmental engagement for decades, but it was not until climate change began to top the international agenda that environmental impact became an everyday part of business life. “This is a very big issue in business today,” says Raul Carlson, an international consultant to industry and a lecturer on product life cycle issues. “I cannot see how any serious company today could work with product development without considering environmental issues.”
Companies measure the impact of their activities on the environment through tools such as life-cycle assessment (LCA). This involves following raw materials from the mine or the well from which they originated, through each processing and manufacturing stage. The environmental impact of the use of the product is measured, as is the way it ends its life, be it through recycling or disposal. “At each stage you identify the emissions, the waste generation and resource use,” says Carlson.
Once a company knows the extent of its impact on the environment, there are a number of ways it can go about reducing it. “One way is to set up long-term goals where each generation of a product series should always have a lower overall impact than the previous one,” explains Carlson. “This means that you set goals such as halving emissions in the next product generation, and you then aim your strategy in that direction.” Some companies build up an in-house database of materials they use and their life cycle assessment values so product designers can see how different choices will affect the environmental impact of a product.
What is driving development towards more environmentally-enhanced products is a mixture of consumer demand and business initiative. “I think that industry is both following market demands and also driving the demand for better environmental performance,” says Carlson. “Information is lacking so consumers can only make quite general demands: we don’t want a large carbon footprint; we don’t want any toxic substances. But the companies have to interpret this into something that they can deliver.”
