The Swedish steel industry has over the past 20 years made substantial efforts to promote energy efficiency and environment protection. However, the dominant part of these investments has been directed to the individual production sites, most of which today have 'solved' their own acute environmental problems. The focus has therefore switched to the properties and performance of the steel products where the evaluation of environ­mental performance is a complex task that often requires simultaneous consideration of many different attributes.

Conjoint analysis is commonly used in marketing research, to evaluate how consumers appreciate specific attributes in products. It has also been widely used in health care, traffic planning and quality management. Conjoint analysis has also been applied to environmental issues such as energy, recreation, environmental valuation, ecosystem management, consumer preferences to products, public preferences to industrial projects, waste management, and environmental policy development. This previous research has shown that the method is well suited for evaluating environmental issues.

Here we briefly present the methodology and review some papers on environmental applications. It is our intention to use this approach as a tool to integrate environmental considerations into both process and product development within the steel industry.