4. Moving towards an eco-friendly organization

Once LCA has been implemented in your company and the progress vectors described in step 3 have been taken into account, the resulting approach will be an integrated eco-design process. Designers will be trained to generate and master eco-innovations themselves, and across all products and projects, which will create significant value for your company. In this respect, we can use the term "eco-design organization".

The framework for such an approach needs to be clearly formalized. The very recent ISO 14006 standard provides guidelines for integrating eco-design into an ISO 14001-type environmental management system. This type of approach has existed in the literature for some ten years, under the acronym POEMS (Product-Oriented Environmental Management Systems).

A POEMS is generally based on a classic Deming wheel (PDCA) scheme. In the case...