Safe Circular Design

Abstract

Today, products are purchased, used, and discarded when they become obsolete, damaged, or no longer desirable. This pattern continues to tie economic growth to environmental losses, leading to increased waste, resource scarcity, and other environmental and societal impacts. Transitioning to a circular economy could in- stead support the preservation of the value of resources and products, eliminating waste and pollution. Achieving this transition requires products to be intention- ally designed to fulfill these requirements. For instance, by extending the useful life to maintain the value of products and materials, by making them suitable for reuse, repair, refurbishment, or recycling. While numerous ongoing efforts focus on achieving this, a significant challenge in circular product design has received limited attention: safety.
By overlooking safety in circular transitions, we risk encountering aggravated or unforeseen risks and limitations when implementing circular strategies. Safety should be explicitly addressed in circular product design throughout all stages of the product lifecycle, enabling materials, products, and their components to be safely cycled. However, awareness, information, and methods for designers to address safety in circular product design are currently limited and absent from the literature. This dissertation addresses this gap by developing methods to support designers in developing products that can safely cycle in a circular economy.
This work is a first exploration of safety aspects in the circular economy from a product design perspective. It examines two angles: first, how product design can influence risks associated with product lifetime extension; and second, how it can influence risks arising throughout the product’s lifecycle from the materi- als it contains. We explored these angles through research on designing for safe non-professional repairs and on mitigating the risks posed by Substances of Con- cern (SoC) throughout product lifecycles. We studied non-professional repairs be- cause safety is often cited as the reason for restricting this group from performing them, thereby limiting the potential of this circular strategy. We studied SoC risks across product lifecycles, as SoC can harm human health and the environment, prevent materials from cycling if contaminated, and, if recirculated, reintroduce contaminants, amplifying existing risks. Both topics take the product as the unit of analysis, but the SoC topic also applies a broader lifecycle perspective. Together, they provide complementary perspectives on safety in circular product design.
This dissertation presents five studies that 1) examine how design influences the safety of circular products and 2) present the development of methods to support designers in addressing safety in circular product design. Chapter 2 focuses on design for safe repairs, while Chapters 3 to 6 are dedicated to SoC risks. At the start of this PhD research, the topic of SoC risks in products was largely unexplored. In contrast, safe repairs had been investigated in two previous projects within our research group, which provided a foundation for this work. For this reason, four chapters focus on SoC, and one addresses safe repair...