The Environmental awareness is growing throughout the society and the pressure on manufacturing companies, and their extended value chain, to operate in a more sustainable way. Designing products that can be controlled throughout their value chain and life cycle is one option to secure reuse of the material stream. We hypothesize that increased collaboration and common understanding among industrial stakeholders will promote improved products with regards to sustainability criteria. To test our hypothesizes a model for cross-industry and cross industry and academia collaboration is outlined. This model emphasizes three distinct levels of collaboration, team, company and cluster, and the life cycle stages of a product. Understanding these levels and stages are important not only for assuring correct and rational behavior among actors but also for facilitating a long-term sustainable business model development. This article presents the theories and arguments behind the model and initial results from an aluminum product case. Further verification and calibration of the model will be done by adding case studies as input to the collaboration model.