Embracing Eco-Design: Making a Sustainable Choice

Before delving into the reasons, let’s first understand the significance of eco-design: it’s a methodology aimed at minimizing the environmental impact of products right from their initial conception. By designing products in an environmentally responsible manner throughout their entire lifecycle…

Eco-design involves a dual approach:

– The “multi-stage” approach: from the manufacturing phase to usage, end-of-life, and disposal, the entire lifecycle is included.
– The “multi-criteria” approach: all possible impacts are considered, from the depletion of abiotic resources to energy consumption.

But Isn’t Eco-Design Constricting?

Initially, the idea of eco-design might be intimidating! Indeed, eco-design comes with constraints (regulatory, technical, economic, etc.). However, consumers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of products and services, and their expectations are high. Eco-design means doing better with less, all without limiting product or service performance.

What Are the Benefits of Eco-Design?

The benefits of eco-design are numerous:

• Addressing new consumer expectations. Responsible consumption is now widely shared, with 52% of the French population aspiring to consume more consciously!
• Gaining a competitive edge. By better meeting environmental expectations than your competitors, you’re bound to benefit in the market.
• Eco-design encourages innovation, and as you know, innovations add value.
• Improving performance. According to a 2022 study by ADEME, implementing an eco-design approach led to increased revenue, technical and environmental product performance, and customer satisfaction.
• Anticipating regulations and reducing risks.
• Aligning with current talent values. Just like consumers, a company aiming to reduce its environmental impact is more attractive.

What Strategy Should You Adopt for Eco-Designing Your Product?

The excellent video by eco-conception.fr is a great way to embark on this journey! Here, let’s review the 6 steps of the process for you:

• Clearly define your approach: Before starting, it’s essential to ask the right questions! What need will you address? What product? Who are the involved parties?
• Establish a baseline: By measuring the current environmental performance, you’ll gain an overall view of the lifecycle of what you want to eco-design.
• Define eco-design avenues: Creativity takes the spotlight here! Remember, depending on your product, you’ll need to consider material choices, distribution, usage, lifespan…
• Prioritize the avenues: Which eco-design choices are the most viable?
• Comparative evaluation: This is the pivotal moment! Test your solution and compare it with the baseline. It’s important to assess each lifecycle stage of your product to ensure there’s been no transfer of environmental impact.
• You’ve made it! Your solution is more environmentally friendly, and you can communicate about it! Highlight your company’s environmental efforts both internally and externally.

Digital Eco-Design: Some Concrete Examples

Who said that shoemakers have the worst shoes? At Sopht, responsible digital practices are our expertise, and it was crucial for us to apply eco-design to our solution!

Here are a few examples of best practices in digital web eco-design:

• Remove unused features.
• Optimize user journeys.
• Optimize images.
• Choose an eco-friendly host.
• Use the latest language version.
• Implement an elastic architecture.

There are plenty more! Discover 115 best practices for digital web eco-design on the GreenIT.fr website.

At Sopht, we created a GreenOps solution that is the perfect way to help the environment, update your digital infrastructure and improve your finances all at once. Because going green isn’t just about being environmentally conscious; it’s about saving money, too. We offer multi-cloud monitoring to rationalize your infrastructure and related costs by measuring and comparing your different Cloud Providers environmental efficiency. Our IT asset management services allow you to consolidate, organize and pilot all data related to your IT inventory (laptops, screens, smartphones, routers…) to better amortize your carbon and financial footprint. This helps us understand how your users are interacting with their devices so that you can better manage your IT assets and plan for decarbonization.

Contact us for a demo of our new end-to-end platform.