Built To Last: Inside Lenovo’s Smarter Approach to Sustainable Design

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / October 6, 2025 / The way Lenovo designs devices is becoming more transparent and accountable, with sustainability treated as a measurable part of product performance.

Foto: Accesswire

By Luca Rossi, President of Intelligent Devices Group, Lenovo

I remember the moment clearly. It was about a decade ago, and my washer-dryer had just broken after the warranty expired. The issue was a cracked drum bearing. Fixing it meant replacing the entire drum assembly. The part alone cost nearly as much as a new unit, and the labor would have doubled that. It was wasteful, expensive, and frankly, frustrating. What bothered me most was knowing the entire machine would be discarded over a single failed part. That's bad for the wallet and worse for the environment.

That experience stayed with me. It wasn't just the inconvenience, though that mattered at the time. It revealed something deeper about short-sighted design.

In product design, we often focus on performance and aesthetics. But under the surface, designing for sustainability can reshape how we build and even prevent frustrating experiences like the one I've shared. That's why I've pushed for making repairability and longevity a design priority, not an afterthought.

And that starts with understanding a product's entire life cycle. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) gives us and our customers the data to see where the hotspots contributing to higher product carbon footprint are, literally and environmentally, and helps us design for durability, serviceability, and smarter resource use from the beginning.

Smarter sustainability, powered by Life Cycle Assessment

At Lenovo, we're designing future products with help from a powerful tool: AI-enabled LCA.

Through a partnership with a third-party provider, we're giving our product designers detailed environmental insights, down to the component level, so they can make smarter design decisions from the start.

This means we can now use technology to generate customized Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) within seconds across our portfolio and across sustainability reporting requirements for customers. It translates into real data that reflects how different materials, parts, and production processes contribute to a device's carbon impact throughout its life cycle. Customers will be able to make informed decisions and choose their own shipping options and power sources, among other hotspots that contribute most to PCF. Lenovo will enable LCA across the ThinkPad line-up starting in 2^nd quarter of our fiscal year, with a goal to expand to more product lines.