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Concept
Sustainable products
Summary
Sustainable products are those products that provide environmental, social and economic benefits while protecting public health and environment over their whole life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials until the final disposal.
According to Belz, Frank-Martin., the definition of sustainable product has six characteristics:
Customer satisfaction: any products or services that do not meet customer needs will not survive in the market in a long term.
Dual focus: compared with purely environmental products, sustainable products focus both on ecological and social significance.
Life-cycle orientation: sustainable products are environmentally-friendly throughout their entire life. That is, from the moment the raw materials are extracted to the moment the final product is disposed of, there must be no permanent damage to the environment.
Significant improvements: sustainable products contribute to dealing with socio-ecological problems on a global level, or provide measurable improvements in socio-ecological product performance.
Continuous improvement: as the state of knowledge, technologies and societal expectation continually develop, sustainable products should also continuously improve with regard to social and environmental variation.
Competing offers: sustainable products may still lag behind competing offers, therefore, the competing offers may serve as a benchmark regarding social and ecological performance.
Michael Braungart and William McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things expands on the life-cycle part of this definition. They suggest that every material and product should be made in a manner that when its useful life is over, all the materials of which it is made can be returned to the Earth after composting, or endlessly recycled as raw materials.
Product information can enable, facilitate, require or support consumers or other buyers and importers to identify sustainable products or sustainability of products.
Official source
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