While the practical application varies among disciplines, some common principles are as follows:

* Low-impact materials: choose non-toxic, sustainably-produced or recycled materials which require little energy to process
* Energy efficiency: use manufacturing processes and produce products which require less energy
* Quality and durability: longer-lasting and better-functioning products will have to be replaced less frequently, reducing the impacts of producing replacements
* Design for reuse and recycling: "Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial 'afterlife'."
* Design Impact Measures for total earth footprint and life-cycle assessment for any resource use are increasingly required and available. Many are complex, but some give a quick and accurate whole earth estimates of impacts. One is estimating any spending as consuming an average economic share of global energy use as 8000btu/$ and CO2 production of .57kgCO2/$ (1995$) from DOE figures.
* Sustainable Design Standards and project design guides and also increasingly available and vigorously being developed originated by wide array private and organizations and individuas. There is also a large body of new methods emerging from the rapid development of what has become known as 'sustainability science' promoted by a wide variety of educational and governmental institutions.
* Biomimicry: "redesigning industrial systems on biological lines ... enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles..."
* Service substitution: shifting the mode of consumption from personal ownership of products to provision of services which provide similar functions, e.g. from a private automobile to a carsharing service. Such a system promotes minimal resource use per unit of consumption (e.g., per trip driven).
* Renewability: materials should come from nearby (local or bioregional), sustainably-managed renewable sources that can be composted (or fed to livestock) when their usefulness has been exhausted.
* Healthy Buildings: sustainable building design aims to create buildings that are not harmful to their occupants nor to the larger environment. An important emphasis is on indoor environmental quality, especially indoor air quality.

Source by en.wikipedia.org