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Sustainable Product Development (SPD) has gained increasing significance across businesses, government, and academia as the recognition of sustainability impacts throughout the value chains grows. In this context, manufacturing companies are progressively taking steps to enhance the sustainability performance of their developed products. While environmental sustainability has been a focus in the past, broader sustainability considerations encompassing social and economic dimensions, remain insufficiently addressed in SPD. The lack of systematic incorporation of sustainability considerations into the product development process and the multitude of unconsolidated management practices present challenges for companies and academia. Therefore, this research aims to identify and consolidate the existing management practices for SPD. Through a systematic literature review, 546 practices were identified from the 312 studies, resulting in the consolidation of 61 key management practices for SPD. These practices were further classified according to the context of application, key focus areas and organisational functions, offering valuable insights for SPD research and practice. The consolidated list of management practices serves as a strategic resource, enabling companies to navigate the complexities of SPD and select the most relevant practices to their context. Future research is recommended to delve deeper into the application of the identified SPD practices, explore their impact on sustainable product development, and showcase successful case studies.

Throughout time, the definition of sustainability has been interpreted differently and different philosophies have consequently emerged, each with its own vision of a sustainable society. At the same time, manufacturing firms have focused on environmental improvements, but social aspects have often been neglected. This study identifies 11 philosophies and 51 product design strategies contributing to sustainability awareness, cohesion, and equity, set to ensure social sustainability integration at a manufacturing firm level.

Manufacturing firms are facing the critical need to manage their business growth while staying within the biophysical limits of the planet. Absolute environmental sustainability decoupling (AESD) combines these goals and is one of the keys for manufacturing firms to achieve their sustainable transition. This study offers an initial contribution to categorise decoupling at the firm level while incorporating absolute environmental sustainability goals. It also explores the role of design in achieving AESD and opens doors for further research on manufacturing firms' sustainability transition.

Sustainable Product Development (SPD) enables the systematic incorporation of sustainability into product development and can be achieved by implementing a number of management practices. An industry survey was conducted to investigate the capability of manufacturing companies to apply a consolidated set of 61 SPD management practices. The results indicate that despite the high interest for SPD, the uptake of SPD practices in industry is still behind the state-of-the-art literature. Hence, a greater improvement opportunity exists in the industrial uptake in SPD.

Trade-offs involving multiple criteria that cannot be satisfied at the same time are ubiquitous in engineering design activities. Navigating trade-off decisions can be challenging, especially when it comes to sustainability-related decisions in early-stage projects. Through a systematic literature review, we unravel the challenges related to sustainability trade-offs in technology development, concept design, and other front-end of innovation activities. The challenges, which were evaluated by experts from industry and academia, range from technical and organisational to psychological aspects.

Based on circular economy readiness assessments of six value chain layers, 18 design strategies and five collaboration strategies for circular economy were identified. The design strategies have many applications, from the design of materials, products, and processes to business models, and while some are specific to determined layers, others can be addressed by companies in multiple layers. Furthermore, collaboration across the value chain was found to affect positively the employment of circular economy design strategies, contributing to the fulfilment of solutions’ circularity potential.

Sustainable Product Development (SPD) has been gaining increased attention in academia, industry, and policy. Over the past three decades, significant progress has been observed in incorporation of environmental issues into the product development process, through the so-called ecodesign management practices. Nevertheless, systematisation of the SPD practices, which simultaneously consider the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability, is still missing. To address this gap, this research aims to identify the existing SPD management practices in the academic literature, with special focus on how sustainability dimensions are currently being considered, their coverage in relation to key knowledge areas for product development and their applicability across the SPD phases. Through a systematic literature review, 362 practices were identified and further classified according to a classification criteria. While environmental considerations are still the most prominent ones, the research highlights the importance of the early stages of product development for SPD, as well as the key knowledge areas which are currently being covered by the practices, such as sustainability evaluation and sustainability improvement.