General public environmental awareness and education is increasing, therefore stimulating the demand for reliable, objective and comparable information about products’ environmental performances. The recently published standard series ISO 14040 and ISO 14025 are normalizing the preparation of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) containing comprehensive information relevant to a product’s environmental impact during its life cycle. So far, only a few environmentally leading manufacturing organizations have experimented the preparation of EPDs (mostly from Europe), demonstrating its great potential as a marketing weapon. However the preparation of EPDs is a complex process, requiring collection and analysis of massive amounts of information coming from disparate sources (suppliers, sub-contractors, etc.). In a foreseeable future, the streamlining of the EPD preparation process will require product manufacturers to adapt their information systems (ERP, MES, SCADA) in order to make them capable of gathering, and transmitting the appropriate environmental information. It also requires strong functional integration all along the product supply chain in order to ensure that all the information is made available in a standardized and timely manner. The goal of the present paper is two fold: first to propose a transitional model towards green supply chain management and EPD preparation; second to identify key technologies and methodologies allowing to streamline the EPD process and subsequently the transition toward sustainable product development.

Date Published: 9 February 2001
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 4193, Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing, (9 February 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.417252

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4193:
Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing
Surendra M. Gupta, Editor(s)