Environmentally adapted products will be a necessity for trade and industry in a near future. In densely populated countries or areas there is no space left to put waste on landfill. Awareness that our natural resources are limited has also been accepted. If we shall have our high standard of living and let it grow, and also increase the standard of living for the rest of the world we must find tangible solutions how to use our natural resources in a sustainable way.

This thesis presents an approach how to, with a structured methodology, collect information and knowledge from old products for use in the product developing process. Focus in this collecting will be on environmental issues. The approach is the result from case studies done in the EUREKA-project CLEANTECH. The approach has been continuously improved during the execution of these case studies. The approached constitutes a structure, how to work, and a checklist, what to have in mind. The structure and the checklist have been tested in the product development department of Swedish companies.

In the case studies, different products have been disassembled and the results from that are knowledge how to work in a structured way and development of a knowledge base. The knowledge base resulted into the checklist. During the disassembly discussions have been held with representatives from disassembly industries and from product development departments.

To understand what happens at a specific stage in the product development process, a literature study has been done on this topic. Some of the most well known descriptions of the product development process have been penetrated. The result from this survey is a modified product development process that has been used as a base in this thesis.

In this modified process new activities have been included, activities that facilitate the integration of environmental issues in the product development process. Every phase, step and activity in the product development process has been penetrated to point out the environmental activities and aspects to be focused.

The purpose of this thesis is to give an example of how to integrate environmental aspects with the product development process. This integration must be done in such a way that environmental aspects are ordinary topics in the development of new products.