Achieving Global Sustainability Through Sustainable Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Sustainable product life cycle management aims at minimizing the negative impacts on the environment, society, and economy by managing different stages of a product’s existence. Proper management of the product life cycle thus leads to a reduction in several types of waste such as materials, energy, and time. While there is significant progress on the key enabling technologies and resources for sustainability within the last decade, the traditional models used for product life cycle sustainability are outdated thus hindering a successful shift toward a circular economy and hence these outdated models should be updated properly to cover the needs of the modern manufacturing landscape. In this paper, we challenge the traditional way of managing a product’s life cycle and propose a new sustainable product life cycle approach with the emphasis on multiple life cycles of products as well as their components and materials through iterative repurposing and reuse, and by integrating the disposal concept from the early phases of conception and design for achieving global sustainability. We highlight that by adopting the proposed approach, it is possible to achieve a longer period of actual use of products and save a significant amount of resources.