A framework to identify sustainability indicators for product design

Abstract

Various sustainability indicators have been developed by governments, international organizations, and companies according to their different perspectives. It makes companies difficult to choose proper sustainability indicators for consistent assessments of sustainable products. In this paper, we propose a framework to determine specific categories of sustainability indicators according to design strategies, requirements of customers and legislation. In the proposed framework for company level approach, House of Quality (HOQ) is applied to understand the relationship among potential category indicators, customer needs, and product components. The results of the HOQ are visualized by system dynamics. To define characteristics of nodes of the indicators, the term of change propagation index (CPI) is used. The multiplier characteristic from CPI that has more outputs than inputs would be considered as high priority among potential category indicators. A case study with a coffee maker is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.