Circular and sustainable battery design – The case of digital product passports as information providers during the design phase

Abstract

The need to counteract environmental pollution and climate change has led to companies focusing on becoming more sustainable. Inter alia, product design is a huge lever for the achievement of improved environmental performance, given that about 80% of products’ environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. Hence, it is crucial to incorporate sustainability and circularity considerations into the design process. However, designers often lack the required information to make more sustainable choices during the design phase. Therefore, we aim to identify information from different life cycle phases, which designers would consider supportive in making more sustainable choices and that could be delivered by digital product passports (DPPs). Given the upcoming battery regulation that requires the introduction of DPPs, the use case of battery design was chosen, and ten semi-structured interviews were carried out with battery designers and engineers. The results show the different information from the distinct life cycle phases, which designers consider as helpful in supporting them in designing more sustainable and circular batteries. This contribution adds to the literature on design for sustainability by exploring the potential of DPPs as means of information providers during the design phase of products.