Episode 3: What is a Sustainable Product?
It is crunch time for the climate, and you need to create a sustainable product. But what is that? And is focusing on carbon enough?
In this episode, we answer what is a sustainable product and why your “sustainable” product may not be sustainable tomorrow. We also discuss why narrowly focusing on carbon is an oversimplification of sustainability and what could differentiate a great product manager from a good one.
Episode Notes
What is a sustainable product?
- Before you can understand product sustainability, you need to know what sustainable development is. It’s more than just an environmental and carbon issue. Recall the Brundtland Report in 1987. [0:50]
- Product sustainability minimizes the negative impact of a product over its lifespan. And it’s about translating product sustainability (social, environmental, economic) into business value for the decision-maker, such as improving the brand, growing revenue, reduce cost. [2:23]
- Governance is foundational in a product sustainability program. You need sustainability metrics that are critical for the category embedded into the innovation/product development process, and the product manager plays a key role. [4:20]
- A sustainable product is something that you should be able to produce in perpetuity, and there is no such product because what is sustainable changes over time; things like the availability of resources change, society and customer’s values change, and technologies change. [5:19]
- The definition of a sustainable product today may not be sustainable tomorrow. For example, diesel versus electric cars. You also cannot forget about the aspect of where a product lives across its lifecycle. [6:45]
- Carbon is not a de-facto standard of what sustainability is. Carbon is a simplification and an approximation of sustainability. But there are things it cannot cover in its approximation, such as societal damage, regulations, and harmful substances put into products that could be detrimental to health. [8:20]
- It’s important to understand the multi-criteria view of sustainability, and because sustainability changes over time, it’s better to define products as a more sustainable option rather than a sustainable option. As Jim has been known to say, “There is no such thing as a green product, just a greener product.” [9:00]
What is the risk of narrowly focusing on carbon as an approximation for sustainability? [9:45]
- Some things are correlated to carbon, and others are anti-correlated. [11:00]
- Carbon behaves differently across the lifetime of a product – from the way it’s manufactured, used, and at the end of life - so looking at carbon across different stages is crucial. It’s more than just looking at one parameter but looking at it across the lifetime of a product. [11:30]
- For example - using cars and lamps as how a product used by two different people in two different countries will have a different life, and the tradeoffs are different. [12:10]
- Neil – India did not have consumer packaged goods, and then overnight, they were introduced from Europe and the US, and there was no concept of what to do with the packaging, and India became a big polluter. As a product manager, you need to consider how your product will live when it goes into the market and consider that in the design phase. [13:47]
- When you listen to the global conversation on climate, you hear questions about resource consumption or water use and what happens at the end of life. Things are being missed if you only focus on carbon. A recent CBS news article shows that solar panels and windmills are now ending up in landfill. We knew these would need to be handled at the end of life 25 years ago when they were being designed and brought to market but reducing carbon was th...
