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Design for Recycling – Enhance your products’ end-of-life

Designing with recyclability in mind is crucial for product manufacturers to meet regulatory demands and ensure that products contribute to a circular economy

Regulations such as the European Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) the WEEE and the End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation are pushing for more sustainable products, requiring manufacturers, especially those in sectors like electronics, furniture, and automotive, to focus on Design for Recycling (DfR). These regulations are driving demand for recycled materials and encouraging investment in recycling infrastructure. However, the design of products remains key to ensuring recyclability, as valuable materials are often lost during waste handling.

Without a strong demand for recycled content and extended responsibility for end-of-life recycling, recyclers lack the motivation to invest in advanced technologies. Many designers and engineers also lack a deep understanding of recycling processes, leading to products that are difficult to recycle or incompatible with existing systems. By requiring more recycled materials and setting recyclability standards, the ESPR is driving market demand and improving recycling infrastructure, highlighting the need for better DfR practices.

Every product eventually reaches the end of its life, so it's essential to design with this in mind, enabling recycling and reducing waste. Through years of DfR assessments on our clients' products, we’ve noticed key challenges:

Increasing product complexity, with more diverse plastics and composites that current processes can’t handle.
A growing trend of incorporating electronics and batteries into products like toys, which complicates recycling.
A lack of design considerations on separating materials and accessing electronic components like PCBs.

Practical insights: How to design for real-world recyclability

Different products follow different paths in the end-of-life waste stream. Analyzing the recycling process for specific product categories provides valuable insights for designing products that are truly recyclable. Understanding which components are manually handled and require easy disassembly, versus those that will be shredded and sorted by machines, allows for better material separation. This approach ensures the production of cleaner material fractions, leading to the creation of high-quality new raw materials.

Illustration of Stena Circular Consultings design for recycling methodology

Our Design for Recycling methodology

Stena Circular Consulting employs a hands-on, fact-based methodology to analyze a product’s recycling potential, focusing on three key dimensions:

System: We take into account system prerequisites, such as regulatory frameworks, user behavior, recycling technologies that support recycling. Our assessment aligns with ESPR and other relevant policies specifying eco-design and end-of-life requirements.
Business model: We evaluate economic drivers that support end-of-life management, including incentives and other business factors that promote effective recycling and circular economy practices.
Product design: Our product design evaluation focuses on material choice (whether the materials are recyclable within current processes) and disassembly (whether the joining solutions allow for efficient material separation).

Our methodology adapts to your objectives and product's complexity. The more detailed the input, the more precise the results. This process includes analyzing products and end-of-life (EoL) systems to define recycling rates based on actual yields from real operations while identifying challenges and areas for developments.This creates a baseline to showcase your capabilities, track progress, compare products, and uncover competitive advantages. We work closely with your team to ensure our recommendations fit your needs and drive impactful design improvements.

Components of the Design for Recycling 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 recyclability, we offer a structured methodology that includes:

A close-up of a pile of electronic waste.

System mapping

Illustrate the end-of-life of your product, identifying how it fits into existing recycling systems. Understand material flow, identify the key actors, infrastructure, and waste handling practices involved in the recycling process.

A close-up of a hand placing a circuit board.

Product tear-down

Assess how easily your product can be disassembled for recycling purposes. Focus on the recyclability of materials used, methods for joining components, ease of identification and access to parts to be handled separately.

A person places a component on a precision scale, checking the exact weight displayed.

Quantitative analysis

Determine the recycling, incineration, and landfill rates within a specific waste stream and country by analyzing data on material composition and complexity in EoL handling. Identify design changes to enhance recovery efforts and best impact.

Mechanical components and tools on engineering blueprints, including bearings, calipers, and screws.

Qualitative analysis

Identify challenges to recyclability by examining design, system limitations, and business criteria. Highlight areas for improvement, particularly in material recovery, separation, and processing.

Assorted electronic parts and gadgets displayed on a flat surface.

Identifying and addressing problematic materials

Our assessments often identify materials that are problematic due to their non-recyclability, difficulty separating, or contamination:

Non-recyclable materials:

Inert materials like concrete or ceramics are inherently non-recyclable and typically end up in landfills or as filling material.
Vulcanized rubber is hard to separate and recycle because of its strong molecular bonds and additives.

Recyclable materials with systemic challenges:

Glass is recyclable but often not processed outside packaging streams due to system limitations.
Plastics with fillers, such as chalk or glass fibers change plastic density, contaminating the recycling stream as they are sorted into heavier fractions.

Complex materials:

Composites made from multiple materials require specialized recycling technologies.
Electronics/PCBs contain small amounts of various materials, making extraction and recycling economically challenging.

Design recommendations for improved recycling

Our Design for Recycling methodology offers clear, actionable suggestions to enhance your product’s recyclability. We work closely with your team to pinpoint specific areas for improvement, focusing on key design changes that make your products’ end of life more efficient. This includes prioritizing the use of recyclable materials and reducing the complexity of mixed-material components, which often complicate the recycling process.

We support you implementing design strategies that simplify disassembly, such as using uniform materials for joints and components, allowing for quicker, more effective recycling. Incorporating modularity and ensuring easy access to parts like electronics are further recommendations that optimize sorting and recycling efficiency.

By aligning design efforts with recycling goals, we help you create products that enable a circular economy. Additionally, we assist in identifying the internal capabilities and external partnerships necessary for your organization to succeed in designing for recyclability.

Stena Circular Consulting performed a recyclability assessment of one of our lift products giving us reliable data on how recyclable the lift is and an measure in % on the over all recyclability rate that can be used for benchmarking. More importantly the assessment provided us with ideas for how to improve the recyclability rate by designing parts that enables better separation of materials.

Theodor Ernstson, Director Product Management & Sustainability, Cibes Lift Group AB

Design for Recycling – Enhance your products’ end-of-life

Designing with recyclability in mind is crucial for product manufacturers to meet regulatory demands and ensure that products contribute to a circular economy

Get in touch

Louise Eriksson

Practical insights: How to design for real-world recyclability

Our Design for Recycling methodology

Components of the Design for Recycling method

System mapping

Product tear-down

Quantitative analysis

Qualitative analysis

Identifying and addressing problematic materials

Design recommendations for improved recycling

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