IDEAL&CO develops innovative solutions for sustainable business, and works with partners ranging from small medium enterprises to multinationals as well as research institutes and non-profit organisations to develop profitable products with social and environmental benefits.
IDEAL&CO’s core competence is the application of front-end sustainable product design methodology, including Cradle to Cradle, Biomimicry, and fast-track LCA. With its partners, IDEAL&CO initiates research & design projects on the implementation of sustainable materials, technology and product chain cooperation. IDEAL&CO applies and co-develops state of the art knowledge in sustainable product development to a diverse range of innovative products including street furniture, packaging, guardrails, fashion, bridges, and toilets. Additionally, it provides training, lectures, presentations and workshops on sustainable product development for enterprises and education.
Role in the project
Co-creating a design method for a circular economy, IDEAL&CO will provide a substantial part of the effort in the Design for Multiple Lifecycles work package. Other work packages it supports are Requirement Analysis, Framework Definition and the Collaborative Software Platform. By studying the best practices in the industry and state of the art research on design methodologies for closing the product loop, IDEAL&CO determines the most suitable supports towards circular design, and tailors them to the ResCoM companies and their case study products.
