Design for Circularity: A Framework for Sustainable Product Redesign

Abstract

Implementing circularity presents a multifaceted and intricate challenge to address sustainability issues. With 80% of environmental impacts determined in the design stage, the product's design becomes paramount in enabling the product and/or material circularity. Transitioning from the current linear economy to a circular one requires enforcement of radical approach to the design process. Existing R-strategies frameworks for design are either too complex or overly simplistic to be incorporated organically into product development process. The lack of standardized perspective in different fields when incorporating circular design often led to multiple interpretations of circularity. This paper proposes a framework that supports the incorporation of the R-strategies as four design principles (Reduce, Reuse, Recover, Rethink) to enhance the circularity of the product. The framework will be applied to the redesign of a hybrid thumbdrive-name card design case study. These designs illustrate how the 4R design principles can generate strategies that can be applied to address the circularity of the product while maintaining the same design requirements. A comparative life cycle assessment is performed to each design against the original design and the results are discussed.