Manual on Product-Oriented Environmental Work
Summary
In the last few years, ever-increasing attention has been paid to the environmental impacts from the manufacture, use and disposal of products. The requirements concerning documentation of these impacts are growing and so is the desire to reduce the entire environmental impact of products.
More and more companies are receiving environment-related enquiries from their customers, and increased public, green purchasing is pulling in the same direction. The official eco-labelling schemes (the Nordic Swan and the EU's Flower) and the Danish EPA's Green Buying Guides for Public Procurements contain, for example, a number of specific requirements that products must meet and recommendations that they should live up to.
The overall political objective of product-oriented environmental work is to foster the development of and demand for cleaner products. A cleaner product is a product that pollutes less during its entire life cycle than other, similar products with corresponding deliverables. Compared with environmental action that is focused on cleaner technologies and improvements in the individual company, product-oriented action requires a far greater degree of coordination and cooperation. A productoriented approach means including in the preventive environmental work an assessment of environmental impacts and possibilities for improvement in relation to both the production and the product's life cycle - and acting on the basis of the resulting knowledge. In other words, it is a question of using a life cycle approach.
Internationally, more and more companies are working with "Product Chain Management", where the various companies in a product chain cooperate more closely, and where management and control are tighter. Today, environmental aspects are increasingly included in this cooperation.
An absolute prerequisite for product orientation is sufficient knowledge about the environmental impacts of the products throughout their life cycle and about the possibilities the individual player - which means your customers and suppliers as well - has for reducing the impacts. Therefore, before making far-reaching decisions on how you are going to incorporate the product dimension in your environmental work, you must have sufficient knowledge, both about the products' environmental and occupational health and safety impacts and about the market's expectations and potentials. It is important to include the market angle. No matter how eco-friendly a product may be, if it is not bought and thus does not replace a more environmentally harmful product, there is no benefit.
A product-oriented approach also means that the various parts of your organisation will probably be involved in the company's environmental work in a different way than they used to be. For example, the purchasing department has direct contact with the suppliers, the sales and marketing department has contact with the customers, and the development department must think about life cycle environmental and occupational health and safety impacts when developing new products or modifying existing products. It is important to clarify how all these functions can best support the company's work on the product dimension.
A continuous process
As in all other systematic work, the process is a continuous one, consisting of evaluation, planning, action and follow-up, with the followup leading to new evaluation, decisions and action.
What does the company gain from a product-oriented approach?
Besides reducing its products' environmental impacts, the company gains a number of important side benefits from a product-oriented approach.
The benefits include:
greater knowledge about the products, including their financial aspects closer dialogue and cooperation with customers and suppliers improvement of the company's strategic market position closer coordination and cooperation within the company.
What companies can incorporate the product dimension?
The target group for this manual is companies desiring inspiration and practical recommendations on incorporating the product dimension in their environmental work. Doing this will greatly affect the cooperation in the product chain and therefore also the companies' customers and suppliers, and the manual can thus also be used in the dialogue and cooperation with them. It is not necessary to have experience with life cycle assessments or to have an environmental management system in order to use the manual because the introductory chapters explain how to get going on product-oriented environmental work. It is up to yourselves whether you use the manual as a basis for systematic environmental action or to develop action that is already going on.
The manual's main recommendations
The main things to remember when you want to incorporate the product dimension in your environmental work are shown in the following ten points.These are also the main recommendations in the manual, although it also deals with a wide range of other matters as well. As in any other strategic action, the management must actively support the work and prioritise the action.
| Clarify where the significant environmental impacts occur in the product's life cycle and what it is most relevant to work on. Carry out a pilot project in which you build up knowledge about environmental assessments and a system for carrying them out. |
| Clarify the requirements concerning the products, seen in an environmental light, and the market potentials. Consider also what advantages there might be for yourselves and your customers/suppliers from concerted action. |
| "Sell" the results in the organisation so that everyone understands the benefits of a product-oriented approach. The employees must be actively involved. |
| Decide at management level what the environment-related market strategy must be. |
| Set targets for the product-related improvements and draw up policies for the prioritised action areas, e.g. purchasing or product development. |
| Strengthen and clarify the cooperation between the environmental department and the other departments, so that everyone knows who is responsible for what. |
| Give the employees who are going to work with the environmental aspects of the company's products responsibility and the necessary authority for their work. |
| Draw up rules, check lists, etc. for the environmental work, making sure that they match your level of ambition. |
| Build up a suitable documentation base that is sufficiently flexible to be used in many contexts, both internal and external. |
| Establish routines that ensure that both environmental impacts and market opportunities are followed up on. |