- "A circular economy (also referred to as circularity or CE) is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible."
Designing products and systems that prioritize resource conservation and waste reduction, viewing waste as a resource that can be reused or repurposed.
Circular Economy: An Overview: Understanding What is Circular Economy, what are the principles of Circular Economy, how it works.
Sustainable Design: Understanding the concepts behind sustainable design elements such as Sustainability, Design Strategy & Planning, Systems Thinking, and Lifecycle Thinking.
Life Cycle Assessment: How to measure environmental impacts along the entire life cycle of a product, including raw materials procurement, production, consumption, and recycling.
Materials Selection: An understanding of choosing materials based on their impact on the environment.
Designing for Disassembly: Designing a product in a way that it can be easily disassembled and the parts reused, recycled or disposed of without affecting the environment.
Closed-loop Supply Chain: An understanding of the principles of a circular economy and how to apply them to the supply chain, moving from the traditional linear supply chain model to the circular supply chain model.
Cradle-to-Cradle Design: Designing a product that can be recycled, disassembled, and reused indefinitely without causing harm to the environment.
Product Redesign: Techniques for redesigning a product to improve its sustainability, including material substitutions, function reinterpretation, and recycling.
Sustainable Business Models: Understanding the business models that focus on sustainability such as sustainable production, sustainable supply chain management, and sustainable product design.
Economic Benefits of Circular Economy: Understanding the financial benefits of practicing circular economy based on resource efficiency, increased innovation, and job creation among others.
Environmental Benefits of Circular Economy: Understanding the environmental benefits of practicing circular economy such as reducing waste, conserving resources, and decreasing pollution.
Social Benefits of Circular Economy: Understanding the social gains of adopting the circular economy approach, including poverty reduction and improved livelihoods of people.
Design Thinking: Understanding the design thinking process and how it can be applied to sustainable design.
Circular City: Understanding circular urbanism, circular economy principles applied to cities and how it can promote environmental, social, and economic benefits.
Sustainability Reporting: Understanding the importance of measuring and communicating progress on sustainability and environmental impacts of an organization's activities.
Regenerative Design: A step beyond sustainable design, it focuses on being restorative, regenerative, and contributes positively to the environment, using the design principles of Biomimicry.
Sustainable Consumption: Understanding the approach where sustainable design should consider consumption as part of the design process for products and services.
Natural Capital: Understanding the benefits associated with the natural environment or any aspect of it, including water, air, soil, and biodiversity.
Social Life Cycle Assessment: Understanding the social impacts of a product, including its impact on the social and economic development of a community.
Carbon Footprinting: Understanding how much greenhouse gas emissions are created from the production, use, and disposal of a product.
Reuse and Remanufacturing: Understanding the process of reuse and remanufacturing, and its environmental, economic, and social benefits.
Eco-Design Guidelines: Understanding eco-design guidelines that guide the designers on the criteria for a sustainable product design, such as life cycle assessment, environmental indicators, and functional requirements.
Extended Producer Responsibility: Understanding the principle that all actors involved in the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of a product are responsible and accountable for the product's environmental impacts.
Zero Waste: Understanding the philosophy of zero waste, the circular economy principle that aims to eliminate waste from production processes, supply chains and consumption patterns.
Green Procurement: Understanding procurement strategies that achieve environmental, social and economic goals, such as buying from Green suppliers and considering the entire lifecycle of products while procuring.
Sustainable Packaging: Understanding the importance of reducing waste and creating sustainable packaging that is recyclable or reusable.
Collaborative Consumption: Understanding the consumption of products and services through sharing, swapping, and renting, which significantly reduces waste and plugging into the circular economy.
Sustainable Tourism: Understanding the guiding principles of sustainable tourism design, which considers the environmental, social, and economic impacts of tourism.
Biodiversity Protection: Understanding the importance of biodiversity and its impact on the health of the planet and human wellbeing.
Communication and Education: Understanding the importance of effective communication and educational campaigns that spread awareness and drive behavior change towards adopting sustainable design principles.
Closed-loop systems: This type of Circular economy focuses on designing products and services that can be reused or recycled in a closed-loop system, without the need for new resources.
Product life extension: This type of Circular economy focuses on prolonging the life of products by repairing, repurposing, or refurbishing them, rather than disposing of them.
Sharing platforms: This type of Circular economy involves the sharing of resources, such as cars or tools, to reduce the need for individual ownership and consumption.
Waste-to-resource systems: This type of Circular economy focuses on turning waste into valuable resources, such as using recycled materials to create new products.
Biomimicry: This type of Circular economy takes inspiration from nature, creating products and systems that work in a similar way to natural ecosystems.
Servicization: This type of Circular economy focuses on providing services, rather than products, such as leasing or renting rather than owning.
Collaborative consumption: This type of Circular economy involves individuals or businesses sharing or exchanging products or services, rather than buying new ones.
Upcycling: This type of Circular economy involves the transformation of waste materials into new and higher-value products.
Modularity: This type of Circular economy designs products with interchangeable parts, allowing for easy repair or replacement of individual components rather than discarding the entire product.
Reverse logistics: This type of Circular economy focuses on the management of the return or recycling of products and materials to reduce waste and create new value.
- "CE aims to tackle global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution."
- "The three principles required for the transformation to a circular economy are: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems."
- "The idea and concepts of circular economy (CE) have been studied extensively in academia, business, and government over the past ten years."
- "CE has been gaining popularity because it helps to minimize emissions and consumption of raw materials, open up new market prospects and, principally, increase the sustainability of consumption and improve resource efficiency."
- "At a government level, CE is viewed as means of combating global warming as well as a facilitator of long-term growth."
- "By the year 2050, 9.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (equal to all current emissions from transportation), can be reduced by implementing circular economy strategies in five sectors: cement, aluminum, steel, plastics, and food."
- "In a circular economy, business models play a crucial role in enabling the shift from linear to circular processes."
- "Various business models have been identified that support circularity, including product-as-a-service, sharing platforms, and product life extension models, among others."
- "By contrast, a circular economy aims to transition from a 'take-make-waste' approach to a more restorative and regenerative system."
- "It employs reuse, sharing, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing and recycling to create a closed-loop system, reducing the use of resource inputs and the creation of waste, pollution and carbon emissions."
- "The circular economy aims to keep products, materials, equipment and infrastructure in use for longer, thus improving the productivity of these resources."
- "For example, industrial symbiosis is a strategy where waste from one industry becomes an input for another, creating a network of resource exchange and reducing waste, pollution, and resource consumption."
- "Similarly, circular cities aim to integrate circular principles into urban planning and development, fostering local resource loops and promoting sustainable lifestyles among their citizens."
- "Less than 10% of economic activity worldwide in 2022 and 2023 has been circular."