Ruth Morss is a B2B content creator and freelance writer with a background in Art History. When not pining for Italy, Ruth writes about product development, CAD software, engineering and PTC Mathcad. In her free time, Ruth enjoys rowing crew, baking, and learning why and how engineers do what they do. A self-confessed jewelry fanatic, she believes in accessorizing.
It's no secret that manufacturing leaders are under enormous pressure to decrease their environmental footprint. Manufacturers that are late to act on product sustainability initiatives not only run the risk of losing business—they also face potential fines. In some countries, business leaders could even see jail time.
Regulations coming into force demand manufacturers be able to vouch for the footprint of their products and supply chain. Far-sighted manufacturing leaders will take every opportunity to make their products better and clear the way for innovation that is both profitable and sustainable.
The good news is that incremental product sustainability improvement yield immediate benefits (no grand gestures needed), and that software solutions can make the footprint reduction journey easier—and create additional value along the way. Begin by shoring up your knowledge of basic acronyms and reflecting on a strategic concept.
Understanding the regulatory environment
Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
The European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates product footprint reporting and rapid footprint reductions for 50,000 companies across the globe. It will be phased in from 2024-2028, with companies in the EU going first, followed by exporters to the EU.The
In other words, if your company ships products or parts to the EU, you’ll soon need to comply.
Environmental Product Declaration and Digital Product Passport
As of 2026, products placed on the EU market will need an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) that summarizes their environmental impact. These EPD documents will largely be a function of PLM data.
CSRD also mandates that these same products will need a Digital Product Passport (DPP) by 2027. The DPP will contain data from the EPD, plus a ledger of asset activity, to provide a comprehensive “cradle-to-cradle” scope of the product’s footprint over its full lifecycle.
How will your teams manage that information? Or develop an approach such that this information becomes part of how they design, make, and maintain products?
Implementing a digital thread
A digital thread is an interconnected flow of relevant data that defines a product throughout its lifecycle. It provides a comprehensive view of a product's journey, from initial design and development to manufacturing, maintenance, service, and end of life.
When a digital thread is in place, the right data gets to the right people in the right form at the right time. When it isn’t, homegrown procedures and idiosyncratic tools crop up as highly skilled professionals try to keep on top of the data swirling about them so they can do their jobs.
Your sustainability strategy—and your digital thread journey—starts with PLM software. A digital thread not only enables you to drive footprint reductions across the entire product lifecycle, the presence of a digital thread also allows your highly skilled product designers to contribute to sustainability goals by designing for circularity and sustainability as part of their daily workflows.
With a digital thread, companies can focus on four distinct opportunities to drive footprint reductions throughout the product lifecycle:
- Design for sustainability
- Sustainable product development
- Sustainable manufacturing
- Sustainable service
Design for sustainability
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 80% of a product’s lifetime environmental impact is baked in at the design stage, where 70% of the product’s cost is also determined. The designer can address both these issues with software such as CAD and PLM, and do so before any budget has been spent or any material ordered.
One of the duties (and part of the fun) of product design is experimentation to come up with the best possible solution to a design challenge. Sourcing the right collection of raw materials can be expensive, unwieldy, or impossible, and few engineers have the advanced physics needed to perform high-end analysis by themselves. Real-time simulation and analysis tools can accelerate the process, totaling up embodied carbon and giving the designer instant feedback in design environments like Creo.
Lightweighting is another effective way to reduce a product's footprint—lighter weight products use less material and cost less to ship. If it's a vehicle, it will cost less to fuel and operate over it's lifetime. Lightweighting can be done more efficiently with tools like AI-powered generative design, which produces optimal designs from a set of system design requirements that the product designer puts into the tool. Engineers can either set realistic limits within production capabilities, or leave the tool to generate organic forms for additive manufacturing, which further reduces emissions by localizing the creation of parts and minimizing the amount of material used.
Case study: Cummins
For more than 100 years, Cummins has been in the business of power; they produce diesel and natural gas engines, power generation equipment, and related products. Sustainability— from circularity to water usage for manufacturing—is at the heart of Cummins' product design process. For every newly designed component, Cummins' engineers have a recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse plan. To help achieve these and other corporate goals, Cummins relies on Creo and its generative design capabilities.
Designing the product best able to meet customer and sustainability requirements.
When designers use CAD and PLM tools in tandem with materials databases and manufacturing databases, they can achieve a greater understanding of the environmental impact associated with their choices. When materials, such as steel, arrive at the dock, they carry with them embodied carbon from mining, extraction, transportation, and low-tier manufacturing. For the typical car with an internal combustion engine, McKinsey reports that materials (production and end-of-life) account for 18-25% of a car’s total emissions.
With material sourcing and selection tools, designers can optimize tradeoffs among factors such as sustainability, performance, and cost. PTC's Windchill and Creo products will both integrate with Ansys Granta Material Intelligence (MI), allowing users to select more sustainable materials and make tradeoffs, all within the same software. With a digital thread in place, these material insights can also be used for compliance, quality, or decision-making support.
Sustainable product development
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is an essential technology for tracking and evaluating sustainability tradeoffs. With PLM, all the data associated to each part in an assembly and product is kept in a single source of truth (the PLM system) and not in homegrown or idiosyncratic personal systems. This product ‘recipe’ is known as the Bill of Materials (BOM).
Thanks to the integration of PTC’s Windchill with lifecycle analysis systems such as Makersite, the designer can see the full CO2 footprint for every iteration of the BOM, whether that be for a different configuration of the product, or a variant with materials from several suppliers. Designers also can dig deeper to see a percentage figure indicating the recyclability of components and water usage for the materials involved. As designs change, the BOMs change and the full lifecycle CO2 footprint of the product updates with new product footprint information.
Sustainable manufacturing
Sustainable manufacturing isn’t just about working concurrently with engineering and making production processes more efficient, though efficiency gains like these oftentimes do provide more sustainable outcomes.
The fastest way for manufacturers to decarbonize and meet net-zero targets is to promote circularity through part reuse and remanufacturing. Remanufactured parts are typically 60-90% more carbon efficient than mining-sourced products, since remanufacturing avoids mining extraction that further depletes finite resources. Reuse and remanufacturing also reduces material processing, as well as some transport emissions.
To make circularity profitable, manufacturers need to create both the supply and demand for remanufactured parts. This will require software that promotes modularity and configure-to-order designs. Automotive, heavy equipment, and power generation industries pivoted to modular, configure-to-order design 20 years ago and now have strong secondary markets for their remanufactured parts. This means manufacturers must start preparing and planning for this transition now, even if their first modularly designed products don’t come out for a few years.
Sustainable service
Poorly executed service strategies can upend customer relationships when parts are rushed overnight, or delayed service turns into a full-fledged service emergency—with the emissions and costs to match. Software solutions like ServiceMax can help monitor products for when they need service, limiting truck rolls to indignant customers while extending the expected lifetime of assets installed in the field.
Other service lifecycle management (SLM) solutions, such as PTC’s Servigistics, are optimizing service parts supply chains by using AI technology to ensure that the right parts are in the right place at the right time. If you've ever forgotten something on a trip, you can only imagine the consternation a commercial airline goes through when a critical service part isn’t immediately available nearby for a necessary repair or maintenance procedure.
Take a step back
The United Nations' 17 Goals for Sustainable Development define sustainability as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
About a century ago, horse pollution (corpses, waste, accidents and injury) imperiled the public health and growth of American cities. The internal combustion engine and the private car were viewed as ‘environmental saviors’ at the time. Today? Cars and vans produce about 10% of worldwide emissions. The next evolution of transportation is likely to be the electric car, a software-defined vehicle.
Whatever your business, don’t wait to develop a strong digital foundation. Think of your customers. You make the products they rely on, and you want to continue doing that for a long time.
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