Beyond engineering: ecodesign as a proactive approach to product innovation

This paper highlights the need for ecodesign to innovate. It argues that most current activity views ecodesign as a “corrective” activity and is closely tied to the lifecycle principles. In terms of improvements, this approach generally, deals with the incremental rather than the innovative, and tends to view ecodesign as a strictly technical problem to be dealt with through materials and processes, and “engineered out”. Though useful, LCA (life cycle assessment) is essentially reactive, while there is an increasing need to be proactive in our ecodesign approach. Using experiences for the eco-kitchen project, this paper demonstrates how to consider “environment” as early as possible, and illustrates how we can focus and stimulate ecodesign innovation