As you brainstorm ideas for greening your product development process, let your new quality and sustainability parameters guide your thinking in ways that may have not been on the table before. Try using your new model as the driving force behind your product design team's strategy session for your next project and see what comes out of it.

Let your designers explore out-of-the-box ideas and see what sorts of new discussions arise. Envisioning the future doesn't mean all proposed ideas are realistic today, but it does encourage product developers to dream about what a perfect product looks like to them.

Here are some queries to pose to get the creative juices flowing:

How can we minimize waste at every stage?

Finding uses for manufacturing byproducts is a great way to reduce waste. Think about where your waste may be useful. Can it be used to create energy or serve as a raw material input to another process? Can a product design or process be slightly changed to make previously unusable waste ready for a future life? For example, a dairy farm in western Montana installed two 30,000-gallon anaerobic digester tanks to create its own energy. Additionally, the digested outputs are nitrogen-rich and sold as soil amendments. Quite a story for manure.

Packaging: When considering ways to cut down on waste, consider reducing or eliminating your product packaging. Either move is a great way to cut down on your company's waste. And don't forget about the resources and research available when you become a member of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (see www.sustainablepackaging.org).

Can we explore new materials, particularly recycled or post-consumer waste materials? If so, by what percentage?

This is an important question to put out there because closed-loop manufacturing (a core component of sustainable product design) is all about using recycled and reclaimed raw materials rather than virgin materials and feeding the product in question into another cycle at its end of life. Continuous recycling of materials is the goal. Responding to growth in the natural lawn and garden market, TerraCycle sells plant food composed of worm detritus. The product is packaged in reused plastic bottles and shipped in boxes that other companies would chuck out.

Are the technical and biological nutrients easily seperable?

As explained in "Rethinking How Products Are Designed: Cradle to Cradle (C2C)," considering a product's end of life is critical, and the need to easily separate components for their next lives is a core concept of extended product responsibility and C2C thinking. Can you easily distinguish the biological and technical components in your products? How might you look at your design process if you knew you had to segregate out these two elements at the end of life?

Is our product easy to disassemble and therefore able to serve as a component for another like-kind product or the next generation of a similar product?

An office chair constructed of natural fibers and fillers that are grafted to postindustrial steel tubing can easily be disassembled at life's end because of the attachment choices made in the design phases (the natural coverings attach to the steel tubing with a snap system). At end of life, the natural fabrics are detached and sent to the compost bin, and the steel tubing is reused for the next generation of office furniture.

eWaste: Don't forget about hazardous waste and e-waste issues. Think of ways to mitigate hazardous waste issues by using more natural alternatives and consider the recyclability of any electronics you use and/or produce. Disposing of hazardous waste is incredibly expensive, and eliminating this step will almost always decrease costs for your company.

Can we cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of the manufacturing process?

Decreasing energy used is obviously very important. Consider ways your company can decrease weight for shipping purposes and think about where you can decrease the need for heating, cooling, machining, and the like.

Also look at whether you have the capability to generate renewable energy in order to decrease your reliance on fossil fuels. For example, a Rocky Mountain brewery uses 100-percent wind power to run its operations. It analyzed the difference in carbon dioxide emissions between using wind power and capturing and reusing heat generated via its fermentation process and found that wind had six times the capacity to reduce emissions than the recycled heat did.