Are design for disassembly principles advantageous for the environment when applied to temporary exhibition installations?

Abstract

Disassembly of a product is a systematic process of separating an item into components and subcomponents and is a key factor to foster a more circular economy in which resources are kept longer. The aim of this study is to explore how to combine design for disassembly indicators with a life cycle-based tool and investigate the environmental benefits of design for disassembly. The intent is to assess the environmental sustainability of an exhibition area, from a circular economy perspective, by using design for disassembly principles and a carbon footprint methodology. These two methodologies are used to evaluate the environmental benefits in combination with the efforts to improve the disassembly process and to propose a method to normalise and scale up the impacts at a higher level. The results show that, for this specific case study, improvements in terms of recycled content led to limited environmental benefits, reducing the impact by approximately 1%. This is because the practise of reutilisation was largely applied by the company designing and producing the temporary installation being studied; in addition, improvements in the recycling rate at the expense of reuse led to a higher environmental impact, of approximately 15%. The results reveal that efforts to improve the disassembly and circularity can lead to limited improvements in terms of impact on the environment, and efforts to increase material recycling should not be performed at the expense of reuse. What is transferable, beyond the case study used as a base to develop our intent, is that it is always advisable to combine design for disassembly and life cycle-based principles to quantify the environmental benefits and address the efforts to improve a product in terms of circularity.