Ford, SC Johnson and HP may hail from disparate industries, but these Fortune 500 companies have at least one thing in common: They're integrating environmental factors into the design of their products in ways that enhance value yet create fewer environmental impacts.

Ford has created a soy-based seat cushion foam, for example, while SC Johnson uses a green list process to weed out restricted ingredients. HP, meanwhile, cut packaging on a recent product by 97 percent.

Joseph Fiksel

These are the types of innovative examples you'll find in the book, "Design for Environment." An updated edition comes out in July.

Today we're being joined by its author, Joseph Fiksel, who is also the executive director of Ohio State University's Center for Resilience and a featured speaker at GreenBiz.com's upcoming Greener By Design conference. We'll explore the principles behind the Design for Environment framework, and Joseph will explain what's driving this movement and offer advice to companies new to the game.

Tilde Herrera: Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Mr. Fiksel. I know that you have a new book coming out in July called "Design for Environment" that examines how companies are designing successful, profitable products yet these products have fewer environmental impacts.

What would you say are the factors driving this?

Joseph Fiksel: Well, there are a number of drivers, beginning with external drivers that come from the business environment. These are things like governmental initiatives from both international and U.S. agencies, such as the waste and electronic equipment ordinances that require companies to design their products with end-of-life in mind.

There are a variety of environmental management systems standards like ISO-14001. We have sustainability rating schemes such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. All of these are pushing companies towards greater awareness of their environmental performance.

We also have things like eco-labeling, where companies are actually putting labels disclosing the environmental properties of their products. And we have various codes of conduct, such as the Ceres principles.

However, in my opinion the really important drivers are not so much the external drivers but it's the business drivers. And those have to do with recognition by companies that there is value associated with adopting sustainability and environmental principles.

And that includes both the tangible drivers: opportunities for improved efficiency, for improved asset utilization, reducing risks and growing the company. It is also the intangibles, things like reputation, the strength of alliances with customers and suppliers licensed to operate and licensed to grow. And one very important one is just human capital: Establishing greater pride and loyalty among employees and being able to attract and retain talent.

The one thing I didn't mention is the market drivers and that is customers who are expecting more from companies, expecting them to behave in an environmentally responsible fashion, to produce products that have a smaller environmental footprint.

This is more coming from industry customers as opposed to consumers in the marketplace. However, there's a growing minority of consumers that are also looking for this.

TH: Generally speaking, do you think that companies are moving quickly enough to move the needle forward in terms of product design?

JF: Well, there are some early adopters that have been working on this for years. Starting back in the '90s, there were some industry sectors that really embraced these ideas in the field of electronics, in chemicals, even in consumer products, companies like P&G, DuPont, HP and so forth.

However, I'd say maybe 10 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies are really invested in integrating this kind of thinking about Design for Environment into their products and processes.

And so in answer to your question there's not enough being done to move the needle forward significantly. Companies are somewhat hampered by the need to be competitive. I believe that what's needed is more collaboration within supply chains and across industries, including public/private collaboration to create business conditions where companies can really make more radical moves towards improving environmental performance.

TH: Now how would you define Design for Environment?

JF: I define it very simply as a systematic consideration of the performance of a product design with respect to environmental health, safety and sustainability objectives. Taking into account the full lifecycle of the product from supply to manufacturing to customer use and to eventual disposal.

If you look at the current practice today among leading companies most of them follow these kinds of principles. The first one is the idea of lifecycle thinking. I mentioned the different lifecycle stages. Some people talk about going from cradle to cradle -- from the initial extraction of resources from the environment to the end of life of the product and then the recovery or recycling of those materials, which we consider assets basically. They shouldn't be thrown away.

So that encourages sort of a broad systems view of the supply chain. When you design you shouldn't just think about the product in its use but think about everything that goes into the product before it's made and after it's obsolete.

The second major point is measurement. It's really important to be able to measure environmental performance using metrics that reflect potential adverse impacts as well as opportunities. To give you an example, DuPont has introduced a metric which they call shareholder value per pound. So they look at how much value am I creating for each pound of material that I produce.

So that's not a traditional environmental metric which measures negative impacts like pollution. It's a measure of actual value creation based on the efficiency and the resource efficiency of their processes.

Now there are other principles that are documented in the book which have to do with design strategies. And there's a number of different ways to go about trying to design sustainable products.

One is what we call dematerialization, which means basically reducing the throughput of resources necessary to create and support and service the product.

To give you an example of that, packaging is a major area of opportunity. HP was able to reduce the packaging on their Pavilion notebook on one of their models by 97 percent, which is amazing.

Another kind of opportunity is using renewable materials instead of using synthetic or scarce materials. For example, Ford has introduced soy-based foam for the seat cushions on all of their vehicles, or a lot of their vehicles. And since that's renewable, it doesn't deplete environmental resources. It also reduces carbon emissions. There's a lot of concern today about greenhouse gas emissions, and Design for Environment principles will basically reduce the energy and material footprint of a product.

A more radical way to do this is to actually convert from selling a product to providing a service. And we've seen a number of companies and new businesses spring up that are substituting services for products. An example is Zipcar, which you may have seen in your municipality.

Instead of owning a car you can go and lease a car for a few hours and then just drop it off somewhere when you're done with it. Those vehicles have much higher utilization, and so overall, this makes us much more efficient in our use of transportation resources.