26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Environmental consciousness has drastically evolved over the last few decades. The consequences of pollution, raw material depletion, global warming... are now widespread throughout society. Numerous tools and guides have been developed to help or strongly encourage companies to deal with sustainable development principles, including International Policy Frameworks, Codes of Conduct, Sustainability or Social Responsibility Reports, Auditing, Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks. In this paper, we will try to show to what extent the concept of EcoDesign can participate in this purpose, due to the fact that Eco Design is a process in which the products or services are designed in order to reduce their environmental impact in each step of their life cycle. As a result, it is important to take environmental characteristics into account in the development process as soon as possible in order to obtain greener products and services. However, the environmental concerns are so broad (water, air, waste, noise, raw material depletion ...) that we can wonder how to apply the practices of EcoDesign. Are there specific steps to take environmental criteria into account in the design of the product? Can each company use the same process to have an eco-design approach? This paper aims to answer both questions. An initial paragraph highlights the context of the research and defines the EcoDesign concept on the basis of the theories, processes, tools and methods we can find in the literature. Several examples of companies designing eco-products are also taken into consideration. Based on the previous search, we introduce, in a second paragraph, a proposal for a generic process of implementing an eco-design project (EPDP – Eco-Product Development Process). Indeed, some common points were identified, among which was the necessary implication of multi-expertise in the process and the assessment of environmental impacts in order to identify possible improvements, considering the whole life cycle of the product. The third part is more practical. In order to validate our proposal, we tested it in a firm that manufactures and sells small domestic appliances. A gap analysis between our theoretical proposal and what is realized in the tested company is set up to allow a critical review of the process before concluding about its direct applicability to firms. As a result, our major contribution is in the confirmation, by means of a real industrial case, that our proposal is feasible and directly applicable in the industrial sector. We will also discuss the expansions of the study based on a limitation we have already found: the necessity to take into account the characteristics of the industrial sector in order to specify our proposal for each type. This aspect will be very interesting both for academics and practitioners interested in green processes and sustainability.