Our electronic devices often end up in landfills because the system lacks sustainable disposal options. The Circular Design Guide offers a process to create business models considering future waste. It involves understanding, defining, making, and releasing products aligned with circular principles. Examples include Loop Industries, Philips, and Interface. By rethinking product lifecycles, we can minimize environmental impact and build a more sustainable future.
For that phone to avoid ending in landfill, the product would have needed some consideration of circular design from the outset.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO worked together to develop the Circular Design Guide. Circular design is a design thinking process that intends to build new business models which consider the future of the product waste in multiple dimensions.
The circular design process comprises four stages and is informed by approaches such as design thinking and human-centered design. The four steps are:
- Understand
- Define
- Make
- Release
Let’s think about each of these four steps that businesses could follow:
In simplest terms, this is getting to know the user and the system. This involves understanding circular flows, regenerative thinking, servitization of a product, understanding the materials used, seeking inspiration from digital innovation, and learning from nature.
This is putting into words the design challenge, seeking circular opportunities, building the team of stakeholders, creating the circular business models and developing the brand.
Business models that support the circular economy might include approaches such as closed loop recycling, downcycling to create lower quality products, upcycling to create higher quality products, industrial symbiosis across multiple industries and/or systems, collection or take-back programs, converting a product offering into a service offering (or servitization of a product), locking in a circular solution, creating local loops, modularizing products for disassembly and repairability, and personalizing products to ensure longer-term buy-in from customers.
The Make stage involves developing the product using research, ideation, feedback, selecting circular materials, developing a strategy and prototyping products.
and finally,
4. Release
And finally, releasing the design into the marketplace involves understanding the supply chain, testing the product in the market, engaging new partners, creating the story of the value proposition and generating brand loyalty, aligning with the organization’s business model, and creating continuous loops.
Some really good examples of circular design and circular business models are Loop Industries. Loop is a new, revolutionary system that allows customers to subscribe to utilize a reusable packaging model for select food, household and personal items from leading brands, including Clorox, Cascade, Febreze, Haagen-Dazs, Pantene, Tide, Seventh Generation, et cetera.
Philips was formerly a light bulb manufacturing company that has since transitioned to become a circular lighting service company that provides guaranteed lighting performance regarding energy, light level, and uptime. With this new business model, Philips retains ownership of the lights and takes care of the reuse, refurbishing, and recycling to ensure that customers get the maximum value from the system.
Interface is a prominent example in the sustainability and circular economy realm. Interface has completely changed the carpeting industry’s paradigm by shifting a carpet tile rental business model using renewable and recyclable materials allowing only worn, torn or damaged pieces to be replaced vs. having to remove entire rooms of carpets.
Other prominent examples of circular and sustainable business models that shift paradigms by utilizing unused or “waste” resources include Uber and Lyft in transportation, AirBnB in lodging, and Canon in printing, replacing selling ink cartridges to selling the ink.
