Product Standards for Multiple-Function Products in Product Policy

Emergence of multiple-function products (MFPs) poses a variety of challenges and risks for achieving sustainable consumption and production as well as fair consumer society and universal design. We overviewed MFPs from these viewpoints and then, focusing on product standard as a means to create mechanisms to reduce environmental loads from products, elucidated advantages and limitation of five approaches of standard-setting for MFPs. The five approches examined were (1) neglecting a multiple function, (2) individual presentation of every function, (3) integrated evaluation of functions, (4) segementation of products, and (5) use of frontier analysis.