We live in a fast-consuming era, where manufacturers producing products faster than ever and with only one lifecyle in mind. This phenomena has resulted in products being designed and manufactured with attention to the company profit and insufficient attention to the implementation of circular approached and by extent sustainability. Currently, the implementation of circularity is only considered at the end of the life of a product and not from the beginning during the design of the product. To achieve circularity there is the need to add more requirements to the product design that are coming from the concept of circular economy. Therefore, in the current paper we have defined additional design steps that are adding more requirement. Those steps include the incorporation of the product re-use, repurpose, re-manufacture and recycling. We provide a structural approach to quantifying circularity in design in order to close the gap between conventional design methods and sustainability.
The presented work was partially supported by the projects CIRCULess and PLOOTO, EU H2020 projects under grant agreements No 101138330 and 101092008.