Merck
CN
HomeOur Corporate ResponsibilityDesign for Sustainability

Design for Sustainability

Design for Sustainability

Our Approach

Design for Sustainability is our gold-standard design approach that keeps sustainability at the forefront of each stage of the product life cycle to minimize environmental and health impact, and simultaneously improve product performance.

DfS is comprised of three components: Development, Consulting, and Re-engineering.

Throughout the Product Development Process (PDP), DfS-Development ensures a comprehensive focus on sustainability when developing and engineering products.

With DfS-Consulting, we focus on sharing our expertise and experience with customers, collaborating on ways to apply green chemistry design thinking to their own research and operations approaches.

Our Re-engineering component leverages our industry-first framework based on our DOZN™ Quantitative Green Chemistry Evaluator and the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry to identify what is "greener" about our re-engineered Greener Alternative Products, and provide cutting-edge greener products and tools to more than 1 million customers around the world.

DfS-Development: How our process works

  • We jumpstart a greener PDP with DfS-Development by brainstorming the environmental impact across the product life cycle, defining sustainability targets, and assessing sustainability characteristics of the new product.
  • This process is supported by our DfS scorecard, which helps drive and assess quantifiable sustainability improvement in our products.
  • Products are evaluated against our product sustainability criteria, which are prioritized depending on the product type, and we identify potential trade-offs between improvements or degradations.
  • Our new products that demonstrate significant sustainability characteristics from our DfS scorecard are identified as Greener Alternative Products under our DfS-Developed products category. We transparently communicate the sustainability characteristics of these products across our seven impact categories directly on the product’s page.

Our DfS Scorecard: Founded Upon our Seven Impact Categories

Our DfS scorecard quantifies sustainability improvements in our products. We evaluate products against our product sustainability criteria that were defined in order to cover the main sources of impact on human health and the environment and were grouped in seven impact categories. Assessed through a stand-alone characteristic or through a comparison with a baseline product, they form the basis for assessing the sustainability characteristics of our new products.

Design for Sustainability (DfS) Scorecard

See the scorecard in action for Stericup® E-GP Funnel-less Sterile Vacuum Filtration System, 500 mL. Find out more about Reliable Sterile Filtration - Less Plastic and Packaging.

Sign In To Continue

To continue reading please sign in or create an account.

Don't Have An Account?