Many beautiful-looking products have an underlying ugliness that is hidden to the consumer and is often invisible to the designer as well. Sustainable products are those that are the best for people, profits and the planet. Fabrication is where many of the environmental and social impacts lie, with damage being caused by the extraction of raw materials and by pollution rising from manufacturing processes. Then there is the notion of producer responsibility. Products don't disappear after being sold.
All products die eventually when they come to the end of their useful life.
This site presents a radical but simple framework for sustainability. It is fast and easy to use, whether you are designing a product or considering buying it. Environmental issues are complex and can seem hard to get to grips with. The approaches in this book build on the lessons learnt through many years' experience and hundreds of product innovations, and the book has been designed tomake the challenge of sustainable design more approachable. So despite the complexity involved in understanding the environmental impacts of a product, there are relatively few routes for innovation, and most of them guarantee and improvement in environmental performance most of the time.