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Design for Circularity – Elevate your product strategy

Designing for circularity involves more than just product changes – it requires a holistic approach to ensure re-circulation in practice

The traditional linear model is wasteful by design. It is rooted in the extraction of new resources and contributes to over 50% of global climate impact. This leads to significant indirect emissions for companies, coming from raw material supply and product lifecycles - Scope 3 - which are hard to tackle.

Relying only on energy efficiency and green energy isn’t enough. As environmental concerns grow, so does the demand for material efficiency and sustainable products. Policies like the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) drive this shift by establishing circularity as the norm, requiring products to be durable, repairable, and reusable.

Adopting circular design is essential for addressing these issues. Shifting to circular design can help businesses lower costs, reduce emissions, and create new economic opportunities while ensuring compliance with regulations and boosting brand loyalty.

Various computer hardware components, including a graphics card, cooling fans, motherboard, hard drive, and RAM, arranged on a black surface.

Our work on Design for Circularity (DfC) helps uncover obstacles to be addressed:

Trend-driven designs, poor focus on functional lifespan and rapid upgrades lead to quick obsolescence, promoting disposal instead of longevity.
Products designed without modularity, sealed, and non-replaceable components limit opportunities to reuse, repair, or remanufacture.
The lack of access to standardized or affordable spare parts makes repairs costly and impractical, discouraging to keep the product in use.
Insufficient logistics and infrastructure to maintain, transport, and upgrade products limit scalability.

Disassembled bicycle parts neatly arranged on an orange background.

Illustration of Stena Circular Consultings circular design advantage

Our Design for Circularity methodology

DfC focuses on the inner loops of a circular economy: Repair, Reuse, Refurbish, and Remanufacture. These loops keep products in circulation, minimizing waste and reducing the need for new resources. Designing for circularity involves more than just product changes—it requires a holistic approach to ensure re-circulation in practice. This involves addressing prerequisites within three core areas:

Product design - durability, disassembly, repairability, upgradeability, etc.
System - regulatory, technical, logistical, customer factors, etc.
Business model - revenue opportunities, incentives, economic viability, market relevance, etc.

We recognize that circularity isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. Our DfC assessments can be customized to best meet your business strategy, whether it's repair, reuse, refurbishment and/or remanufacturing. The appropriate approach depends on your goals, capabilities, product's complexity, and industry context. Our assessment can also integrate Design for Recycling to even address end-of-life and recycling considerations.

Components of the Design for Circularity method

Depending on your team’s need, we can adapt the pace of intervention, through an iterative approach, from intensive workshop sessions to full scope analysis. To evaluate your product’s baseline for circularity, we offer a structured methodology that includes:

System mapping

Illustrate the lifecycle of your product, identifying how it fits into the selected circular loop. Understand usage patterns, identify involved actors, infrastructures and handling practices.

Various electronic parts displayed on a table, contrasting with a bright green backdrop.

Product tear-down

Evaluate how easily your product can be disassembled, restored or upgraded. Focus on joining methods, access to critical parts, component identification, and material durability.

A shelf displaying an assortment of vintage motors and various mechanical parts.

Quantitative analysis

Identify challenges in implementing circularity, focusing on design, system, and business criteria to highlight areas of improvement for repairs, reuse, refurbishment or remanufacture.

A close-up view of a clutch and clutch disc resting on a black surface.

Qualitative analysis

Analyze data on product performance, part accessibility, failure rate, lifespan and residual value to identify where product design changes can have the most significant impact.

Regulatory alignment: Meeting compliance while driving innovation

Our proprietary methodology is aligned with evolving regulatory requirements that increasingly mandate circular practices. This includes market-specific directives like the French Repairability Index, current EU’s regulations and the forthcoming Right to Repair and ESPR requirements which will establish new standards across the EU for product circularity. By integrating regulatory insights, we help ensure that your products not only meet today’s standards but are also future-proofed. This means you are not only ready for the market but also positioned to meet consumer expectations and government requirements.

A hand gripping a compact device powered by a small battery, showcasing the intersection of technology and portabilit

But there’s more at stake than just compliance

Circularity offers businesses a significant competitive advantage by creating products that are designed to be reused, repaired, refurbished, or remanufactured. Our product assessment helps you profit from new revenue streams, deep customer loyalty and reduce long-term operational costs. For example:

Identifying critical components’ value helps companies optimize pricing and find opportunities for added services like spare sales, maintenance, or extended warranties.
Improving product durability supports longer life cycles and enables new revenue through secondary sales, pay-per-use, leasing or PaaS.
Evaluating the residual value of components after use, uncovers opportunities for take-back to recover valuables such as semiconductors and motors, avoiding waste and harvesting crititcal resources.

Tailored recommendations for your designs

The Design for Circularity methodology equips you with clear, actionable insights to transform your product design. We provide tailored recommendations that help you and your design team pinpoint product flaws and identify areas for improvement, ensuring you to design for real circularity.

Together, we generate ideas for prioritized developments that align with your goals and capabilities, creating a comprehensive roadmap for success - whether you’re looking for immediate changes or long-term strategies. Recognizing that circularity is a systemic effort, we facilitate alignment across departments - design, supply, customer service and sales - ensuring everyone is engaged.

Finally, we assist you in identifying the right partners and internal capabilities needed to support your journey, empowering your organization to thrive.

Design for Circularity – Elevate your product strategy

Designing for circularity involves more than just product changes – it requires a holistic approach to ensure re-circulation in practice

Get in touch

Louise Eriksson

Our Design for Circularity methodology

Components of the Design for Circularity method

System mapping

Product tear-down

Quantitative analysis

Qualitative analysis

Regulatory alignment: Meeting compliance while driving innovation

But there’s more at stake than just compliance

Tailored recommendations for your designs

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