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International audience; The integration of the environmental criteria in clients/suppliers co-design process becomes an important issue owing to the growing influence of suppliers’ design choices on the clients’ products. This issue is currently poorly integrated in such a design context because of the limited ability for low mature suppliers to provide the basic environmental information to the clients; and of the difficulty for clients to properly size requirements in accordance with to the suppliers’ expertise. The paper describes a proposed method called "Environmental specifications diagnosis method" which is being developed in order to improve the requirements management. This method aims firstly at increasing the companies’ awareness toward environmental issues by positioning companies regarding the current sectorial practices. Secondly, the method provides a support for the clarification of better tuned requirements regarding the suppliers’ expertise. The paper provides also results from a case study performed with an industrial of the French mechanical industry in order to test the method validity.

International audience; This paper investigates how the environment is taken in account in the client/supplier relationship. This issue is particularly important given the growing influence of suppliers’ design choices on the environmental performance of the client’s product. An empirical study has been performed with twenty companies of the French mechanical industry from SMEs to large multinational companies. The survey highlights the weakness of environmental information exchanges between the different actors, yet comitted in the same design process at different levels