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This chapter describes the relevant steps for the design of a preventive maintenance program in an oil refinery plant and its application. The method was developed during a period of 3 years in one of the main Italian refinery.

In this chapter topics related to environmental marketing and new product development have been analyzed. During our research, we could see that, despite being the source of much activity and considerable research, green marketing gives the impression of being significantly unsuccessful. This can be compared to the beginning of the 1990s when green marketing was in fashion and consumers were expressing an environmental concern and a readiness to buy green products. For environmentally orientated products to succeed, they will need to be effective in terms of their marketplace performance. In today’s increasingly eco-friendly world, companies involved in a supply chain have an on-going challenge to identify the right focus for their products’ green attributes. Consumers are interested but often unsophisticated with their understanding of priority issues—for example, 73% of people think a home cleaning product is green if its packaging is made out of recycled materials while 36% think a home cleaning product is green if it is sold in less packaging (Frechette 2009). So, when it comes to greening its products, what direction is a company to take? Environmental leaders focus on offering more product value with less environmental impact. Leaders also use a strategy based on corporate vision and commitment to improvement and innovation rather than reaction to the market. Some sustainability leaders have focused on developing the optimal tool to prioritize goal-setting and execution during product design. Jennifer Cooper and a team of other experts at Five Winds International (Frechette 2009) have been working with one client to come up with a reliable way for the company to establish and measure product claims against a multitude of brands serving diverse market sectors. The result is a multi-functional scorecard that systematically allows the brand to set goals, measure the products’ environmental impacts, and improve its design. Other industry leaders, such as Philips, SC Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, and Armstrong, also have programs to measure and reduce impacts that are significant to them and their customers. While the measurement factors may differ with each company (energy efficiency vs. sustainably grown wood, for example), the end results are the same: more product value, less environmental impact.

This chapter gives a case study for integrating Design for Environment (DfE) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques both into new product development and into the process of redesigning a set of existing products. The case study explains the reasons for developing DfE in general, and pays particular attention to a specific, chosen product, a class of electrical distribution boards, to illustrate the concept. The main process steps in the development of the DfE are outlined, and the development of a LCA that satisfies the requirements of the ISO 14040 standard is illustrated. This work was developed thanks to the collaboration between the Sustainability Affairs Department of ABB Italia and the Department of Energy Studies of Marche Polytechnic University. The aim of the firm was to create a procedure based on the integration of DfE and LCA methodologies to allow the assessment of improvement, in terms of environmental and economic impact, which could be attributed to a different assembly layout for the “electrical distribution boards” set of products.

Chapter 15 focuses on the supply chain environmental policy. Sustainability affects product considerations from almost every direction—resulting in the rapid growth of an unprecedented number of tools, labels and product-based approaches. This book aims to help companies involved in a supply chain first of all to understand how these apply to their product, sector and secondly how to implement targeted projects to improve their performance and communicate it successfully in the marketplace. Creating interlocking value loops throughout the global economy would be no mean task. It is not impossible, but it would require significant technological advances, an acceptance of the severity of the environmental problems we face, and the will—on the part of both businesses and consumers—to make the shift from value chains to value loops. And, most of all, a strong business case will have to be made to show that there is potential profit and long-term success in protecting natural resources.

This chapter focuses on design for environment (DfE) procedures for developing a more sustainable supply chain. In order to effectively reduce the sustainability impacts of products, the supply chain aspect of product manufacture needs to be incorporated. With the exception of products manufactured in a direct business-to-consumer relationship, most products with significant sustainability impacts, e.g. cars or electronics goods, are manufactured using a number of companies involved in a supply chain. To achieve sustainable supply chain, environmentally conscious design (eco-design) or DfE is becoming an increasingly important topic (Den Haag Brezet H, and Van Hemel C Eco-design: a promising approach to sustainable production and consumption. UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Paris, 1997)

In this chapter a life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis of a domestic cooker hood has been carried out. Cradle-to-grave analysis was performed using the GaBi software with Ecoindicator 99 (Egalitarian Approach). The most polluting phases were “manufacturing” and “use”, the environmental impact being affected especially by production materials and the electricity consumed during the product’s lifespan. The study also highlighted that the hood’s environmental impact is closely related to the power grid mix. Finally, the LCA results suggested an eco-design improvement, i.e. the replacement of the halogen lamp with LED, the use of electro-galvanized stainless steel, and a modification of distribution modality.

This chapter provides the main concepts of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique. LCA process is a systematic, phased approach and consists of four components: goal definition and scoping, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. Moreover a comparative Life Cycle Assessment between two different models of domestic refrigerators has been carried out in this chapter using the eco-indicator methodology. The study of life cycle enabled the analysis and the subsequent comparison of the results about environmental impact, focusing with special attention on those of energetic nature, coming from the comparison between a refrigerator (Old Model) and its successive corresponding model (New Model), which was structurally modified by means of a product’s redesign.

Definition of criteria for optimizing sustainability in product and services is discussed in this chapter. An integrated strategy is thus a strategy where the focus has changed to include not only the traditional costs and service considerations, but also the social and environmental impacts. Thus, the responsibility of greening the supply rests on everyone in the supply chain; from design of products, supply of materials and components, through production processes and delivery to the customers, and finally the return recycling processes. The measurement of supply chain efficiency—such as costs, dependability, quality, reliability, and speed—can be captured with measures of environmental and social impacts

In this chapter we proposed a procedure which, by combining the life cycle analysis (LCA) technique and an appropriate use of quality function deployment (QFD) type multi-criteria matrices, tries to define design specifications for all the stakeholders involved in a supply chain: customers, manufacturers, suppliers, suppliers of the suppliers, etc. In particular by combining LCA techniques and by using the QFD multi-criteria matrices, an “environmental compromise” can be reached. In this work the QFD matrices have been developed in a new way using an iterative process that involves the whole supply chain starting from the product life cycle, taking into consideration the machines that make the product and their components. This methodology is compatible with the requirements of the various stakeholders, suppliers, manufacturers and, clients, involved in the supply chain. Using the proposed procedure, a specific supply chain for packaging systems for liquid food substances (beverage cartons) was studied. Life cycle thinking must influence the environmental management of firms which deal with packaging systems involving all areas of their activity, starting from ways of designing the product and finding raw materials, to packaging and machine production operations and even to the management of the post-consumption/disposal phase.

In this chapter a case study os analyzed. The research work focuses on the application of the life cycle assessment methodology to determine the carbon footprint of the different players involved in a supply chain of the textile sector. A case study of a product by a textile leader company was carried out. This study will demonstrate that, in the textile chain, the main contribution to the greenhouse effect is provided by the electrical and thermal energy used and by the transportation (since the different production phases are delocalized in a wide range that goes from South Africa, Italy, Romania, and all around the world, from the distribution center to the stores). A sensitivity analysis was carried out to evaluate the impact of management choices such as: a change in the transportation modality, from airplane to boat; a combination of road and rail transportation; and a selection among suppliers that allows the firm to cut environmental impacts.

According to many authors, despite the number of available DfE methods and tools, there are relatively few which are widely used by companies. One reason for this low utilization is that they are time-consuming; another is that many of them focus only on environmental issues (Ehrenfeld and Lenox, J Sustain Product Design (1):17–27, 1997). For the enterprises and their engineering designers of course, the environmental issue is but one of many issues to be considered. When DfE methods and tools are used, these methods and tools are often not integrated in the product development process. Chap. 6 investigates the integration opportunities between DfE and Environmental Management System or Product Life Cycle Cost.

This Chapter shows how environmental aspect could be taken into consideration during a Supply Chain design process. An integrated sustainability strategy for SCM is the approach taken in the research streams: reverse logistics, product stewardship, and green SCM. On the supply side, suppliers are chosen, developed, and monitored based on their compliance with international codes of conduct, and this provides sufficient comfort to industrial buyers, who want to know about the origin of raw material and components (Mamic 2005). The products are designed for the environment by eliminating hazardous or harmful materials and making recycling and disposal easy (Srivastava 2007); the current systems and solutions can already cope with these circumstances. The production process is organised to reduce waste of materials, emission of gases, and polluted water, and minimize the consumption of non-renewable energy resources. Transportation and distribution is organized to minimize total mileage, maximize capacity utilization by consolidation of shipments, and to use environmentally friendly transport modes when possible; this is seen as coherent with the logic of efficient distribution systems. The reverse logistics system is organized to maximize the value creation of the returned products, whether it is end-of-life products that are recycled or remanufactured or its commercial returns, which are taken back to the market as soon as possible (Jayaraman and Luo 2007).

In this chapter the most important Design for Environmental (DfE) concepts have been analyzed, taking into consideration the relations between Product Life Cycle aspects and Eco-Design process. Materials and methods have been proposed in order to analyze the integration between DfE aspects and Life Cycle Assessment techniques. A major benefit of the DfE methodology proposed in this work is the possibility to use LCA data both during new product development and when modifying old products, with the aim of continuously reducing the overall environmental impact of products during their life cycle. According to Crul and Diehl (Design for sustainability: a practical approach for developing economies. United Nations Environment Programme, Division of Technology, Industry and Economics, Technische Universiteit Delft, 2006) we think the introduction of Sustainable Products as a process-oriented change in the mental attitude and activities of a business, embedded in the process of product innovation. It requires an understanding of the product’s environmental impact and an ability to envisage the options available to make improvements in this area.