Manufacturing, sustainability, ecodesign and risk: lessons learned from a study of Swedish and English companies

Practitioners Recycling Attitude and Behaviour in the Australian Construction Industry

“…Sustainability methodologies adopted by the industry have been studied, including their eco-design and risk [23]. Source reduction, reuse and recycling measures, waste collection frequency, staff participation in training programs and waste disposal methods were all found to affect attitudes toward waste management.…”

Preparing the way for mainstream sustainable product design

“…Based on the relatively low level of engagement within the industry (Sherwin, 2012;Short et al, 2012;Stevenson, 2013), one might question why so much effort is put into educating future generations of designers about these issues when time might be better spent focusing solely on the skills that the design industry currently utilise. However, to move beyond the status quo, there is a real need to equip product designers with the knowledge, skills, interest, support and environment to create socially and environmentally responsible products, services and systems as part of their mainstream work.…”

“…Empirical research from numerous sources shows that designers typically do not use eco-design tools and methods for a variety of different reasons (Lofthouse, 2006;Luttropp & Lagerstedt, 2006;Macdonald-Smith & Short, 2007;Short et al, 2012). Despite this lack of uptake of eco-design tools, in the Design School at Loughborough University, they are still considered to be an important component of a well-rounded sustainable design education.…”

“…Despite the examples presented above and a growing body of research interested in engaging designers in sustainability (Brezet, 1997;Lofthouse, 2006;Lofthouse, 2004;Simon et al, 1998), there is little evidence of any great sea change across the design industry (Sherwin, 2012;Short, Lee-Mortimer, Luttropp, & Johansson, 2012;Stevenson, 2013). Although there is often an appetite for sustainable design thinking among individual designers, the opportunity to actively engage with the issue is often not there.…”

Inclusion of sustainability aspects in product development at manufacturing companies

“…As mentioned in the former subchapter 3.3.2 Challenges and barriers, there are barriers (Jönbrink et al, 2013;van Hemel and Cramer, 2002;Poulikidou et al, 2014;Bey et al, 2013), obstacles (Boks, 2006), hurdles and hinders (Short et al, 2012) described in prior studies, which can hamper the inclusion of sustainability aspects in product development. These barriers, obstacles, hurdles and hinders may also be seen as reasons for challenges related to the inclusion of sustainability aspects in product development.…”