Sustainability Standards Portal (SSP)

The Sustainability Standards Portal provides:

• A comprehensive list of standards with details and links to the original standard developer website.
• A facility to search standards based on various categories.
• A framework for analysis of standards from different perspectives.
• An understanding of gaps and overlaps of standards.
• A set of recommendations for harmonizing standards (future work). 

To achieve sustainability, products, processes, and services should meet the challenges not only related to their functions and performance but also to environment, economy, and social issues. Currently, researchers from different perspectives using various approaches are addressing these challenges. Companies interested in developing sustainable products should be sensitive to sustainability-related standards, design, and manufacturing techniques and tools.

Ensuring a sustainable future requires an integrated system of systems approach. Interlinked pathways of interaction at various levels characterize such systems. These levels span technical, economic, ecological, and societal issues. The interactions within and across these levels are critical to the fundamental understanding of sustainable design and manufacturing, because addressing any one of the issues in isolation could result in unintended consequences.