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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Consumers often replace electronic products prematurely due to performance issues (Van den Berge et al., 2021). Repair is a promising strategy to extend product lifetime by correcting faults to restore functionality (Pamminger et al., 2017) or realigning the product performance with users’ functional expectations via upgrades (Godfrey et al., 2022). However, repair activities declined over the past decades with 60% consumers disregarding repair when products malfunction (Magnier & Mugge, 2022). Recent consumer studies have revealed the barriers to repair. Consumers often struggle to diagnose product failures (Ackermann et al., 2018; Pozo Arcos et al., 2021), causing uncertainty about repair paths. Previous negative repair experiences further demotivate repair (Sonego et al., 2022), making consumers doubt its value (Svensson-Hoglund et al., 2022). The uncertainty about the availability of spare parts, clear repair instructions, and trustworthy repair services increase concerns about repair (Jaeger-Erben et al., 2021; Sonego et al., 2022). These lead to a lack of consumers’ trust, acceptance and adoption of repair practices. […]

Nowadays, the circular economy represents a promising strategy for achieving sustainable development through optimising resource efficiency, extending product lifespans, and reducing environmental impacts. Despite the growing interest in circular design practices, companies often face difficulties integrating these principles into their established New Product Development (NPD) processes. This is mainly due to the overwhelming number of available design tools and methods, which are fragmented, challenging to navigate, overlap in functionality, and lack standardisation. This study provides a comprehensive mapping, classification, and analysis of 77 existing circular design tools identified through a systematic literature review and supplementary online searches. The tools were systematically categorised according to format, data type, industry sector, circular strategies, innovation focus, aims, and applicability across the NPD stages. The results indicate a predominance of physical, qualitative, and sector-agnostic tools, emphasising circularity integration within the Discover, Define, and Develop phases of the design process. This structured classification facilitates stakeholder navigation of existing resources, highlighting opportunities for more targeted, industry-specific tool development, consumer-oriented approaches, and the importance of considering Industry 4.0 technologies in circular design practice. Future research could address these gaps by developing customised frameworks, validating tool effectiveness through real industrial applications, and promoting deeper integration of circular design tools within NPD practices and business objectives.