Hanna Taller is a content creator for PTC’s ALM Marketing team. She is responsible for increasing brand awareness and driving thought leadership for Codebeamer. Hanna is passionate about creating insightful content centered around ALM, life sciences, automotive technology, and avionics.
For automotive manufacturers, sustainability goals are no longer separate from business goals. As regulations evolve, customer expectations increase, and product complexity grows, organizations need practical ways to reduce environmental impact while maintaining profitability and competitiveness.
In PTC’s webinar, Improving Product Sustainability in Automotive, sustainability experts Dave Duncan and Kreig Cutter explore how automotive companies can measure, reduce, and manage product sustainability throughout the product lifecycle while aligning these efforts with key business objectives.
The three sustainability challenges facing automotive manufacturers
The webinar identifies three primary sustainability challenges automotive organizations must address:
- Measuring product footprints
- Reducing product footprint
- Establishing circular business models
These challenges require manufacturers to understand the environmental impact of their products, identify opportunities to reduce that impact profitably, and create new business models that extend product value beyond the initial sale.
When measuring product footprints, organizations must account for greenhouse gas emissions, hazardous materials, and finite material loss. Increasing regulatory requirements are driving the need for greater visibility into these factors across the entire product lifecycle.
Sustainability must align with business outcomes
One of the central themes of the webinar is that sustainability initiatives are most successful when they support broader business goals.
Rather than treating sustainability as a compliance exercise, automotive manufacturers should connect sustainability effort to strategic priorities such as:
- Faster time to market
- Improved quality
- Reduced product costs
- Increased service revenue and margins
According to the presenters, product footprint reduction becomes sustainable when it aligns with these business objectives. For example, improving material efficiency can reduce both environmental impact and product costs, while circular business models can create new service revenue opportunities.
Finding profitable sustainability opportunities
Many manufacturers assume sustainability improvements automatically increase costs. The webinar challenges this perception, highlighting that significant sustainability gains can be achieved while creating business value.
The presenters note that reducing energy consumption and material usage lowers costs directly. Beyond efficiency improvements, organizations can benefit from transitioning to cleaner energy sources and incorporating more circular materials into products and processes.
The webinar also emphasizes that circularity represents a major opportunity. Rather than focusing only on recycling, companies should prioritize higher-value approaches such as repair, reuse, refurbishment, and manufacturing whenever possible. These approaches help preserve product value while reducing the need for new raw materials.
Understanding product footprint hotspots
One of the most important insights from the session is that a product’s manufacturing facility is often not the largest contributor to its environmental footprint.
The presenters explain that upstream activities such as material extraction, processing, and supplier manufacturing frequently account for a significant portion of a product’s footprint. Downstream impacts during product use can also be substantial, depending on the product and energy sources involved. Circularity plays a critical role in helping organizations achieve long-term sustainability goals by enabling the recovery and reuse of materials and products.
Understanding where impacts occur allows engineering, sustainability, and product teams to focus their effort on the areas that can deliver the greatest business and environmental returns.
Digital product passport: A foundation for sustainable products
A major focus of the webinar is the growing importance of Digital Product Passports (DPPs).
The presenters describe a Digital Product Passport as a type of “nutrition label” for a product that captures information about carbon emissions, water usage, material content, hazardous substances, and circularity characteristics. Some passports can also track products throughout their operational lifecycle to support circular business models and regulatory compliance.
Using PLM, CAD, supplier data, manufacturing information, and life cycle assessment tools, manufacturers can create “as-designed” passports that provide visibility into product sustainability performance. This information helps teams identify environmental hotspots, evaluate design alternatives, and make more informed decisions earlier in development.
Beyond design, organizations can extend the passport into service and operational stages by creating “as-serviced” passports. These DPPs track ownership, service events, upgrades, and end-of-life activities, helping organizations support circularity initiatives and new revenue-generating service models.
Designing for sustainability
The webinar also highlighted the importance of integrating sustainability directly into product engineering processes.
Design for Sustainability (DfS) includes managing sustainability-related requirements alongside traditional engineering requirements. Teams can define goals such as increasing recycled material recovery, improving compliance, reducing lifecycle carbon footprint, or adopting sustainability best practices within development workflows.
Advanced engineering techniques can further support these goals. Material selection, generative design, topology optimization, and manufacturing process simulation can help engineers reduce material usage, improve efficiency, and lower product footprints while maintaining performance requirements.
The role of software-defined vehicles
The transition to software-defined products is also creating new sustainability opportunities.
The webinar explains that software plays an increasingly important role in electric drivetrains and broader vehicle functionality. Remote monitoring, remote diagnostics, software updates, and service optimization can improve product utilization, extend product life, and support circular business models. Integrated Product Engineering helps connect the product, software, and service lifecycle needed to support these outcomes.
Key takeaways
Automotive manufacturers face growing pressure to improve sustainability performance, but the webinar makes a compelling case that sustainability does not have to come at the expense of profitability.
By focusing on product footprints, circular business models, Digital Product Passports, and Desing for Sustainability practices, organizations can create a framework that connects environmental objectives directly to business outcomes. As the presenters conclude, product footprint reduction is most successful when it is profitable, and DPPs provide a critical foundation for addressing sustainability challenges at scale.
For automotive organizations pursuing sustainability goals, the path forward is not simply about compliance. It is about better products, creating new revenue opportunities, and establishing a more resilient and efficient product lifecycle.
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