Sparking the Repair “Can-Do” Attitude: Enhancing Users’ Willingness to Repair through Design Support in Fault Diagnostics

Current production and consumption patterns of consumer electronics have a negative impact on our environment. Designers can contribute to changing these patterns with more sustainable product design. Prolonging product lifetimes can have a positive impact, for which repair is a promising solution. However, the fact that a product can be...

L'Internet of Things per la transizione circolare nel settore delle facciate

In the façade sector, the ecological and circular transition requires the adoption of new business models that exploit the value of the material as much as possible. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) is identified as a potential innovation driver for the widespread use of circular approaches. The aim of the paper is to clarify the...

Why Circular Business Models Fail And What To Do About It: A Preliminary Framework And Lessons Learned From A Case In The European Union (Eu)

The circular economy aims to decouple economic growth from negative environmental impacts. To achieve this goal, circular economy concepts and policies must be implemented in practice by organizations through new circular business models. However, organizations often fail to implement circular business models on the market at scale. This is a...

Drivers and Barriers to the Circular Economy Transition: The Case of Recycled Plastics in the Automotive Sector in the European Union

The circular economy aims to decouple growth from environmental impacts by optimizing resource use, minimizing waste and pollution. The European Union (EU) has the ambition to lead a circular economy transition on a global level. Realizing the transition is complex, because it requires substantial and interconnected changes in the current...

Building energy retrofit-as-a-service: a Total Value of Ownership assessment methodology to support whole life-cycle building circularity and decarbonisation: Construction Management and Economics

The regulatory drive to accelerate the clean energy and circular economy transitions in the European building stock is currently failing to overcome systemic implementation barriers. These barriers include high initial investment costs, misaligned financial incentives among stakeholders, and the relatively low cost of less sustainable energy and...

Actor Behaviour and Robustness of Industrial Symbiosis Networks: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

Industrial Symbiosis Networks (ISNs) consist of firms that exchange residual materials and energy locally, in order to gain economic, environmental and/or social advantages. In practice, ISNs regularly fail when partners leave and the recovery of residual streams ends. Regarding the current societal need for a shift towards sustainability, it is...

A Life Cycle Assessment of reprocessing face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic led to threatening shortages in healthcare of medical products such as face masks. Due to this major impact on our healthcare society an initiative was conducted between March and July 2020 for reprocessing of face masks from 19 different hospitals. This exceptional opportunity was used to study the costs impact and the...

Towards Circular Social Housing: An Exploration of Practices, Barriers, and Enablers

The concept of Circular Economy (CE) and its application in the built environment is an emerging research field. Scholars approach CE from various perspectives covering a wide range of topics from material innovation to city-scale application. However, there is little research on CE implementation in housing stock, particularly that which is...

Quantitative sustainability assessment of household food waste management in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area

Food waste represents the largest fraction of the municipal solid waste generated in Europe and its management is associated to suboptimal performance in environmental, health, and social dimensions. By processing detailed multi-fold local data as part of a comprehensive and broadly understandable sustainability framework, this study quantifies...

Biocatalysis and biomass conversion: Enabling a circular economy

Two of the grand societal and technological challenges of the twenty first century are the 'greening' of chemicals manufacture and the ongoing transition to a bio-based economy: that is a sustainable, carbon-neutral economy based on renewable biomass as the raw material. These challenges are motivated by the need to eliminate environmental...

Industrial Symbiosis: Towards a design process for eco-industrial clusters by integrating Circular Economy and Industrial Ecology perspectives

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a collective approach to competitive advantage in which separate industries create a cooperative network to exchange materials, energy, water and/or by-products. By addressing issues related to resource depletion, waste management and pollution, IS plays an important role in the transition towards sustainable...

Circular Economy in the building sector: Three cases and a collaboration tool

The Circular Economy (CE) gained significant traction in business and academia. While in the building sector issues around energy efficiency are being widely explored, CE is still a relatively new topic. This article reports on three CE pilots in the Dutch building sector and develops a collaboration tool for developing and operating circular...

The Circular Economy: A new sustainability paradigm?

While the terms Circular Economy and sustainability are increasingly gaining traction with academia, industry, and policymakers, the similarities and differences between both concepts remain ambiguous. The relationship between the concepts is not made explicit in literature, which is blurring their conceptual contours and constrains the...

Design for Change and Circularity: Accommodating Circular Material & Product Flows in Construction

Circular building concepts, as proposed within e.g. Circular Economy and Cradle-to-Cradle frameworks, imply radical changes for the construction sector. Cradle-to-Cradle® in particular has put forward the idea of buildings as material banks, radically altering the way material flows need to be managed. The notion of material banks (temporary...