Sustainable consumption in Brazil: Identification of preliminary requirements to guide product development and the definition of public policies Ângela Maria Marx, Istefani Carísio de Paula and Fabiane Sum Abstract Sustainable product development is closely related to sustainable consumption.The understanding of consumers’ purchase, use and discard behaviours may facilitate the identification of requirements to guide manufacturers in the development of sustainable goods and services.The aim of this paper is to investigate consumers’ perception about factors that motivate or discourage the consumption of sustainable products to identify demands and convert them into requirements. South Brazilian green and traditional consumers were asked to complete an exploratory qualitative questionnaire. Their answers were organized and compared to identify differences and similarities between the demands of these two groups. Furthermore, demands were converted into requirements for packages, products, manufactures, stores planning and discard systems.The interpretation of factors that motivate or discourage the purchase of sustainable products given by interviewees led to the creation of a list of possible public policies or programmes, aiming to support sustainable consumption. The results demonstrate the necessity of further quantitative investigation between consumer groups, for validation purposes. Keywords: Sustainable consumption; Sustainable product development; Sustainable consumption and production policies; Brazil. 1. Introduction The significance of sustainable development was formally acknowledged in the Brundtland report in 1987 (WCED, 1987; Seyfang, 2003) leading to legal, financial and market pressures on organizations to develop sustainable products and services (Maxwell and Van der Vorst, 2003). According to Seliger et al. (2006), sustainability strives to increase productivity and resource use to attend human needs, without compromising the planet’s natural limits. In a sustainability approach, products, services and processes must be systemically designed considering social, environmental and economical issues in a triple bottom-line (TBL) related to their entire lifecycle (Seliger and Mertins, 2007; Luttropp and Karlsson, 2001). Therefore, sustainable new product development (NPD) is a complex task that requires the design of production and consumption elements in an optimized balance, within a system that usually includes several stakeholders. The complexity of sustainable NPD is in part due to the large amount of information that is input in the development process of goods and services. The information sources include stakeholder’s requirements, as well as political, technological, social, environmental and economical factors (Baxter, 1996; Marx, 2009). The input information will be used along the development process to generate goods and services that meet customers’ needs. Possible stakeholders include consumers, workers and suppliers, as well as the community and the government, among others. All of them have particular interests and demands, which relate to distinct phases of the product lifecycle. Understanding the needs of stakeholders is central to avoid design and market drawbacks originating from deficiencies in requirements elicitation and product definition in the early phases of product development (Tseng and Jiao, 1997; Kotonya and Sommerville, 2000; Young, 2003; Creveling et al., 2003). The marketing assessment of potential consumers is commonly performed by specialized agencies via interviews, focus groups or other information assessment methods that are usually considered expensive. Pujari and Ângela Maria Marx is a PhD student at the Industrial Engineering Department of the Rio Grande do Sul Federal University, Brazil. E-mail: amarx@producao.ufrgs.br Istefani Carísio de Paula is a Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of the Rio Grande do Sul Federal University, Brazil. Fabiane Sum is undergraduate student at the Industrial Engineering Department of the Rio Grande do Sul Federal University, Brazil. Natural Resources Forum 34 (2010) 51–62 © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 United Nations