Design for Product Circularity: Circular Economy Indicators With Tools Mapped Along the Engineering Design Process

Monitoring the circularity potential of products and materials is key to ensure environmental savings and economic profitability of circular economy loops, such as reuse, remanufacturing, or recycling. The choices and decisions made during the product design phase have a major influence and impact on the circularity performance of products. While numerous indicators and tools have been recently developed to assess, manage, and accelerate the transition to a more circular economy, their application and usability during the early design phases of products are often overlooked. Based on a screening of several tens of circular economy indicators, the present research work identified twelve product-centric circularity indicators, each of them coming with a computational tool, to be deployed during the design process in order to improve the circularity potential of products. To help designers and engineers selecting the appropriate solution, these circularity indicators and tools are positioned on a generic five-step design process, namely: requirements definition, conceptual design, detailed design, designs comparison, product monitoring and communication. Concrete examples are given on how these indicators and their assessment framework can support the design of more circular products. Current shortcomings of available approaches are finally highlighted and discussed (such as the lack of c-indicators for the detailed design phase or linkage with computer-aided design software) for an augmented integration of such promising circularity indicators and their associated tools within the design and development process of products.