If sustainability requirements are not taken into account until after the concept or design freeze in product development, effort and costs skyrocket:
- Late changes to materials, architecture, or manufacturing processes result in rework, additional testing, and delays.
- Scope 3 issues escalate because data and evidence are lacking. Scope 3 refers to all indirect greenhouse gas emissions along the value chain—i.e., from purchased materials and components, transportation, customer use, and disposal/end-of-life.
- Verification (e.g., material origin, reparability, circularity) becomes a special effort rather than part of the normal development process.
Why R&D is the most cost-effective lever:
The key levers for sustainability are set in early development decisions: material selection, system architecture, energy requirements, service life, repairability, modularity, and manufacturing and service concepts. Later on, only “optimization within the existing framework” is usually possible—at significantly higher costs.
Approach: Embed sustainability as an engineering discipline
- Define sustainability requirements: Establish sustainability goals as clear, verifiable requirements (analogous to safety, quality, and cost).
- Manage trade-offs early: Transparent evaluation of costs ↔ CO₂ ↔ quality ↔ time-to-market before design decisions are finalized.
- Expand development gates/sprints: Incorporate “Design-to-Carbon / Design-to-Circularity / Design-to-Repair” as standard checkpoints.
- Establish data flow via the bill of materials: Material data, supplier information, and documentation as recurring development outputs, structured and versioned.
Those who integrate sustainability early in R&D meet requirements with maximum impact and at the lowest cost.