During the past years, a number of life cycle analyses have been carried out for various caravan- and hotel products. Most studies confirm that the usage phase is by far the most environmentally harmful phase.
As a result of this, Dometic has decided to continuously and systematic reinforce the environmental performance of new products through integrating certain tools in the product development process such as:
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Environmental Guideline for Product Development
This document was initially created in 2000. It has now been revised and up-dated in order to meet today’s environmental requirements. The guide contains information of environmental aspects during the product life cycle, material choice, product usage phase and product end-of-life treatment. The objective of the documents is to enhance and incorporate environmental thinking into product development and the overall daily business.
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Environmental Checklist for Product Development
The checklist was initially created in 2000. It has now been completely revised in order to better meet the needs of the R&D and product design departments. The new checklist is a “real” check list where the project manager has to go through a number of questions regarding environmental legislation, use of chemicals, important environmental impact during product use, Dometic internal requirements and other issues.
To ensure that the environmental tasks are getting full attention during a product development project, a structured project model must be followed. This process is called Environmental Analysis. The basic idea is to identify a limited number of environmental indicators in the beginning of a project. For these indicators targets should be set, and these targets are thereafter followed during the project.
The idea of a recycling index is to quantify the design of the product in respect to easy disassembly and recyclability. The product manager completes a number of questions, which gives the product a certain score. This score could then be compared with a reference model, which could be either a competitor model, or a previous own model.
Dometic environmental team is currently under way to introduce these tool at the factories R&D and product design departments.