ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and discusses the earliest approaches in the DfS field, namely, green design and ecodesign. Green design primarily focused on lowering environmental impact through redesigning the individual qualities of individual products. Ecodesign, on the other hand, put emphasis on the whole life cycle of a product, ranging from the extraction of raw materials, through manufacturing, distribution and use, and on to final disposal. This enabled profiling of the environmental impact of products across all life-cycle phases, identifying those phases with the highest environmental impact and thus providing a strategic direction for design interventions. Green design and ecodesign introduced and developed the still-valid rules of thumb for reducing the environmental impacts of products. Nevertheless, green design and ecodesign focus only on environmental impacts and they also fall short on intellectual and political depth. Rather than being taken as sufficient strategies for sustainable design, they should be seen as useful components of long-term and systemic innovation strategies at company, regional, national and supranational levels.
