Product environment

Sustainability

We at Bang & Olufsen strive to design environmentally friendly products. As we see it, consideration for environmentally friendly qualities is a must – aspects customers take for granted and expect to have been appropriately covered.
 
At Bang & Olufsen we develop high-quality products with long lifetimes. Our designs are timeless and many households throughout the world have perfectly-working Bang & Olufsen products that are 20-30 years old.
 
On average, a Bang & Olufsen product has a lifetime of 10-15 years without any loss of audio or video quality. Products are exhaustively mechanically tested before they are released for production, to ensure high-quality throughout their lifetime. They are tested to ensure they can withstand cold, heat, vibrations, sunlight, dust, etc.
 
In the unlikely event that a product has a fault during its lifetime, it can of course be repaired. We deliver spare parts in a considerable period after a product has ceased to be manufactured. We also have mechanical spare parts - for example front and back panels, if a unit becoming scratched or damaged.
 
The high quality and long lifetime are environmentally positive assets for our products. Furthermore at Bang & Olufsen we include environmental thinking as early as possible in the design phase of our products. This is why we already have comprehensive environmental specifications laid down in the development phase. We call these environmental specifications Environmental Design Standards.
 
Environmental Design Standards include statutory and regulatory specifications as well as more stringent company specifications and regulations that cover areas where there are as yet no statutory regulations. There has been assigned a product environmental impact gatekeeper that is responsible that products comply with the Environmental Design Standards.
 
Every Bang & Olufsen product has its own product requirement database, which follows the product throughout the development phase wherein the Environmental design standards are specified.
 
For each product there is a Project Manager and he or she must accept the specifications, and sign-off that the product will meet the specifications. The product simply cannot progress to the next development stage unless it has met the relevant environmental design standards.
 
At the end of the development phase, the Product Environmental Impact gatekeeper must verify that the specifications laid down in the product database have been met – the product cannot be produced otherwise. The implementation of environmental design standards ensures that our products meet international regulations in those markets where our products are sold.
 
Furthermore we carry out tests that simulate the dismantling process at the disposal after 15–20 years of use to ensure that the product can actually be separated into the appropriate fractions. This process also generates suggestions for improvement in utilization of waste of products that we can apply to subsequent development projects. All this work is intended to help us achieve environmental improvements in relation to previous products by including live cycle considerations during the development of new products.