Conference Agenda

Manufacturing firms are facing the critical need to manage their business growth while staying within the biophysical limits of the planet. Absolute environmental sustainability decoupling (AESD) combines these goals and is one of the keys for manufacturing firms to achieve their sustainable transition. This study offers an initial contribution to categorise decoupling at the firm level while incorporating absolute environmental sustainability goals. It also explores the role of design in achieving AESD and opens doors for further research on manufacturing firms' sustainability transition.

Interdisciplinary transition innovation, management, and engineering (InTIME) Design has been developed to overcome sustainability transition challenges in complex systems. The intersections of InTIME Design with a range of reported design for sustainability (DfS) approaches were analysed. Results demonstrate similar core principles across DfS approaches. InTIME Design accomplishes convergence of the studied approaches, and organises the DfS approaches into workflow phases, adds a complimentary wicked problem definition, and deploys systems engineering problem solving.

This paper aims to develop a risk assessment framework that addresses both the complexities of the risk landscape that green transition portfolios face, but is recognizable and easily understandable by stakeholders. For this purpose, we build upon the framework of NASA Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). This study analyzes six existing readiness levels framework that are held towards uncertainty factors from the Green Transition. The TRL scale are coupled with Risk, Uncertainty, and Ignorance to score the individual level of uncertainty. The paper ends with suggestion for further studies.

The discourse surrounding sustainable consumption and production has evolved to encompass sufficiency strategies in addition to efficiency and effectiveness. Product-service systems (PSSs) can promote sufficiency by replacing traditional product-intensive systems with dematerialized services and changes in ownership structures. Sufficiency-oriented PSS may, however, generate rebound effects which offset potential sufficiency benefits or even result in backfire. This paper examines the connection between sufficiency-oriented PSS and rebound reviewing 12 empirical studies addressing rebound.

Multiple industries have hailed lightweighting promise to reduce the mass of their product at equivalent or improved performance. Lightweighting as a strategy encompasses lightweight end-product desired attributes and through-life processing decisions. Assessment of lightweighting gathers information for decision-making towards the optimization of these strategies. An exploratory study, using systems thinking is conducted, to identify requirements of lightweighting and its assessment in terms of holistically defining its impact on the sustainability of its background system, the Earth.