Improvement of product sustainability

Increasing global population and consumption are causing declining natural and social systems. Sustainable development addresses these issues by integrating strategies for economic successes, environmental quality, and social equity. A Sustainability Target Method (STM) provides a practical sustainability target for individual businesses and products through determining the relative indicator resource productivity for environmental performance and the absolute indicator Eco-Efficiency. Based on the indicators in STM, this paper formulates the component selection problem such that a company can improve sustainability of its products most effectively through improving components´ performance. The approach is illustrated through an example.