A house of sustainability-based approach for green product design: Setting future research agenda

Abstract

Purpose

Investors are looking for the organizations which have robust strategy and planning method meeting the current and future guidelines and policies on environmental regulations to improve sustainability. Thus, most of the business units have been striving to incorporate sustainability into process and product or service design in such a way that carbon footprint should be minimized. Sustainable product and service design remain a challenge for industrial organizations because of the involvement of multifaceted factors in the design endeavor. The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology to include sustainability functions at the design phase of the product or process.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors have modified the house of quality concept, and grey relational analysis-house of sustainability process is proposed in this paper, which includes consideration of all sustainability dimensions including environmental at the design phase of the product or process development. The process has been explained with an example of retail service design.

Findings

The proposed approach incorporates the specific business environment and the type of product to be designed with all three levels of sustainability by design. By capturing all sustainability dimensions in the design stage itself, various issues may be taken care of at the initial stage of operations, which are likely to affect sustainability in all activities of the supply chain and the organization as a whole. Thus the proactive sustainable designing considerably eases and improves the sustainability reporting and meeting the legislative guidelines prescribed by the governmental agencies of the country.

Originality/value

A novel methodology has been proposed to include sustainability functions at the design phase, which is strategically useful for sustainable operations and to develop a sustainable product or process.

Citation

Upadhyay, P. and Kumar, A. (2020), "A house of sustainability-based approach for green product design: Setting future research agenda", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 819-846. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-03-2019-0057