By Pedro Santos, General Director, Hisense Portugal
The debate about sustainability often remains focused on the most visible actions of daily life. Separating waste, reusing packaging, or choosing products with an eco-label are important practices, but they represent only the most recognizable face of a deeper transformation taking place in factories, laboratories, engineering centers, and supply chains, far from the consumer’s gaze.
In the case of household appliances, this reality is particularly evident. Much of a product’s environmental impact does not result from the moment it is manufactured, but from how it is used over the years. It is precisely for this reason that energy efficiency, durability, and maintenance have become central criteria for innovation and industrial production.
The European Union estimates that ecodesign and energy labeling rules have already allowed a reduction of around 10% in the annual energy consumption of the products covered and generated savings of 120 billion euros in energy expenses. By 2030, these measures could translate into a significant average annual saving (about 290 euros) per European household.
These numbers help illustrate a structural shift: sustainability has ceased to be a communications exercise and has come to directly influence product design. The industry understood that reducing consumption during daily use has a far greater environmental impact than small, sporadic improvements in the production process, and those who take sustainability seriously have changed priorities.
It is in this context that the principle of double materiality gains prominence, now incorporated into European regulation on corporate sustainability. The concept obliges companies to evaluate not only the impact they have on the environment and society, but also how climate change affects the business itself. This is a major paradigm shift: sustainability ceases to be a peripheral chapter of annual reports and begins to integrate strategic decisions, investment, innovation, and risk management.
European regulation has played a decisive role in this transformation. The new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which came into force in 2024, establishes more ambitious requirements for durability, repairability, reuse, and resource efficiency for virtually all physical goods placed on the European market, obliging the sector to design more efficient, more repairable products and to be more transparent about their life cycle.
Today, industry, instead of considering this type of regulation as a cost or limitation, is beginning to see it as a driver of innovation and competitiveness. More efficient products mean lower energy consumption, less material waste, and greater longevity — factors that respond to environmental and economic demands.
But industrial sustainability is not limited to the energy performance of products. There is a social dimension often less visible and discussed. Policies for including people with disabilities, investment in health and safety at work, respect for suppliers along the value chain, or social auditing mechanisms rarely make headlines, but they are concrete indicators of how organizations apply ESG principles in practice.
It is this quiet revolution that matters to recognize. Because the sustainable transition happens every day in the discreet transformation of the everyday objects we use and in the industry’s ability to reinvent innovation in the light of sustainability.
