Existing material selection methods seem to offer limited support for addressing substance safety in practice, as the focus remains on intrinsic material properties and less on exposure risk. This hinders Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) efforts that can prevent use and accumulation of substances of concern (SoCs) across product lifecycles in a circular economy. This study reviews 29 sustainable material selection methods to evaluate how they do support substance safety. Results show that substance safety is generally embedded within the broader sustainability realm without explicit risk or lifecycle-based assessment. Of the four steps that can be distinguished in material selection, most methods support the steps ‘Establishing a set of candidates’ and ‘Comparing candidates’ but the steps ‘Formulating selection criteria’ and ‘Choosing suitable candidates’ are often unsupported, leaving critical substance safety trade-offs unaddressed. The importance of mindsets such as systemic thinking and iterative reflection is recognized but underrepresented. The findings highlight the need to adapt existing methods with better guidance and risk integration to advance SSbD in material selection.

The short lifespans and rapid innovation cycles of electronic products result in the loss of valuable and critical resources (Bakker, Wang, Huisman, & den Hollander, 2014; Baldé et al., 2024). Strategies aimed at extending product lifetimes, such as design for repair, focus on improving the ease of manual disassembly (De Fazio, Bakker, Flipsen, & Balkenende, 2021). However, connections optimized for repairability can hinder the mechanical separation of materials during recycling. This highlights a critical trade-off: improving repairability can often conflict with recyclability, emphasizing the need for balanced design approaches that address both recovery goals. Navigating these trade-offs requires a deeper understanding of how materials and connection types in electronics affect circular strategies. This research aims to investigate tensions between repairability and recyclability by analyzing a diverse set of electronic products and relating the findings to their design architecture. This study seeks to inform design strategies that optimize for both repairability and recyclability, thus prolonging product lifetime while minimizing resource losses at end-of-life.

The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a fundamental tool for both understanding and creating or changing businesses. It diagrams costs, revenues, your customers, suppliers, and more, so you can make sure they all align. Normal BMCs only consider economic profit, but the Presidio Sustainability Booster adds environmental and social sustainability considerations for every part of the BMC. The Presidio Sustainability Booster is a qualitative and creative tool; it does not quantify whether one business model is better than another. The Presidio Sustainability Booster can help you assess an existing business, and/or help you generate ideas for improving a business.

Wind turbine blades, though key to green energy, pose recycling challenges due to their material composition. This study explored reshaping thermoplastic composite blades—an emerging, more recyclable design—into useful applications without altering the material composition. First, key characteristics like material structure and thickness were defined after which sample material was produced. Reshaping experiments were conducted for both single and double curved geometries with different reshaping methods and parameters. The promising results were translated into a demonstrator re-use application, a lamppost, showcasing reshaping as an alternative to shredding in circular blade strategies.

The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) concept takes natural systems as a source of inspiration, striving toward a positive vision where human society and industry regard waste as “food” for new cycles of use, and are powered entirely by renewable energy. Cradle to Cradle is not about efficiency but about effectiveness—waste need not be minimized if it is food for other cycles, providing positive regenerative impacts. However, this is difficult to achieve in practice. The Circular Economy concept elaborates on the Cradle to Cradle model, prioritizing longer product lifetime and recovering whole products over material recovery through recycling.
The Circular Economy also combines ecological thinking with economic thinking, making a business argument for sustainability.
Both concepts have been very influential in shaping the way we think about design for sustainability.

Devulcanization has the potential to help meet circular economy goals by recovering end-of-life rubber. However, the adoption of devulcanized rubber by manufacturers remains low at the industry level. Devulcanization value chains are complex and involve multiple stakeholders, including waste collectors, sorters, recyclers, compounders, manufacturers and regulatory bodies. This study investigated the barriers compounders and manufacturers face when incorporating devulcanized rubber into new compounds and identified primary underlying causes. The research was conducted through in-depth interviews with compounders and manufacturers of tires and general rubber goods, focusing on the technical, market, institutional, and cultural factors related to incorporating recycled materials, specifically devulcanized rubber. From the results, we identified a number of barriers faced by the industry. A key barrier was the heterogeneity of devulcanized rubber, which made it more difficult to add to new rubber compounds with consistent quality. Other barriers included a lack of standardization and coordination, along with misaligned regulations that hamper the market adoption of devulcanized rubber. This implies that increasing the uptake of devulcanized rubber at the industry level will not be achieved through technological advancements alone or isolated market interventions; instead, it requires comprehensive, systemic solutions.

Product service systems (PSSs) are revenue models where customers pay the company for the service the product provides, not (only) for the physical product itself.
Designing the revenue model along with the product can align economic incentives with environmental impacts, so the company has an incentive to design products for longer lives.
Both the company and the customer can benefit financially from longer‑lived products billed as services.
Not all product service systems are sustainable environmentally or socially, but if properly designed, they can greatly enable the circular economy.