Beyond Sustainable Products – Concept for a Positive Impact Product Engineering (PIPE)

Abstract

The UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, published in 2015, require new ways of imagining and developing products, which poses major challenges to the research field of product development. Since neither analysis nor synthesis methods offer comprehensive and effective solutions so far, the concept of “Positive Impact Product Engineering” (PIPE) is presented as a potential approach to step beyond sustainable products and further leave a positive footprint with them. The holistic methodology combines and extends previous approaches and methods and aims to achieve a positive impact in all three pillars of sustainability along the whole product life cycle.