TY - JOUR A1 - Schlegel, Moritz-Caspar A1 - Koch, Claudia A1 - Mirtsch, Mona A1 - Harrer, Andrea T1 - Smart Products Enable Smart Regulations—Optimal Durability Requirements Facilitated by the IoT JF - Sustainability N2 - The challenges and opportunities linked with IoT have been intensively discussed in recent years. The connectivity of things over their entire life cycle and the smart properties associated with it provide new functionalities and unprecedented availability of (usage) data. This offers huge opportunities for manufacturers, service providers, users, and also policymakers. The latter May impact policy areas such as the regulations on resource and materials efficiency under the Ecodesign Directive 2009/125/EC. With the general approach as it is practiced today, legal requirements are usually set for entire product groups without considering the products individually, including user behavior and environmental conditions. The increasing number of smart products and the growing availability of product data are sparking a discussion on whether these requirements could be more product and application-specific. This paper presents a method for calculating the economically and ecologically optimal durability of a product. It allows determining the point in time when a product should be replaced by combining consumer data with product design data. This novel Approach could contribute to making product regulation more flexible and possibly more efficient. In this context, fundamental challenges associated with smart products in policymaking are also discussed. KW - Ecodesign KW - Internet of Things KW - Connectivity KW - Resource efficiency KW - Policy making PY - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-524924 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084395 VL - 13 IS - 8 SP - 4395 PB - MDPI CY - Basel AN - OPUS4-52492 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -