"Sustainable" products ? : necessity for an overall design approach

International audienceAfter three decades of growing environmental conscious, the stake of developing an environmentally friendlier society has become one of the most important political, economical and sociological challenge worldwide. The ideology of sustainable development has driven politics to carefully imagine regulations, in order to bring the different actors to change their ways of producing and consuming. Focusing initially on the environmental performance of production sites, product manufacturers have reached highly clean production; i.e. they reduce every pollution that is inside the limits of the producer's responsibility. However, modern regulations tend to make the producer responsible of the product even after it has been sold, and therefore, environmental indicators are enlarged to the entire lifecycle of the product. This cradle-to-grave approach leads the manufacturer to take into account new constraints such as: how is the product used? How will it be disposed or is it possible to recover it? The latter was increasingly developed during the last decade, mainly through the recycling of product. Today, under the legislative pressure and to deal with an economy of raw materials and energy used to transform this matter, a new concept appears called "cradle to cradle". This concept aims at defining successive lives for a product, and/or its components and/or its materials. The remanufacturing, for example, makes it possible to transform used products into new products and thus to re-use them several times by prolonging their lifespan. In this paper we show that an overall approach is necessary to define a product related to a sustainable strategy (Remanufacturing, Recycle, Reuse) and we analyze the key success factors for implementing environmental thinking and product's recovery strategies in the industry. This requires considering major changes within the industrial systems. Our focus is made on: economical aspects of the supply chain's coordination and economical behavior regarding remanufactured products; necessary changes in the organization of the firm to progressively implement environmental thinking; tools to designers to facilitate the understanding of the design requirements related to recovery strategies