Product Design for a Circular Economy

Abstract

This paper explores existing design strategies, guidelines and product features that enable functional recovery operations like repair, refurbishing or remanufacturing. A circular economy demands for products to be kept as valuable as possible for as long as possible. Therefore, recovery operations should be easy to perform in an efficient manner, which is influenced by product design. As a result of the literature review conducted, this paper presents a categorization of functional recovery guidelines for product design and identifies the need to plan for recovery at early design stages.