Circular product cycles allow to improve material, component and product productivity, decouple virgin material use, and reduce energy consumption and emissions associated with material extraction and processing.
Circular flows
Improving the productivity of materials, components and products requires a full system view, and the identification of revalorisation options that will keep materials, components and products in use, at their highest level of aggregation, for as long as possible.
We introduce an agnostic framework for describing the different reverse options to boost material, component and product productivity with reference made to our signature applications: electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Circular interventions
In order to migrate a linear economic value chain to a more circular configuration, a number of interventions is required and their implementation in a coordinated fashion. The objectice of these interventions is to change the physical flow of materials, components and products towards higher degrees of cirularity, by maintaining their status at the highest level of quality within the system for as long as possible.
To improve the circularity of materials, components and products over their respective usage cycle, typically a number of levers needs to be integrated into a circular economy programme. These levers commonly fall into one of the following categories:
- Design, which improves resource usage per unit of service (e.g. light weighting, improving material mix) and faciliates revalorsiation along the future usage cycles (e.g. dissassembly, separation)
- Processing, which allows to improve the efficiency, effectivenes and sustainabiliy both of the linear as well as the reverse loops (e.g. improving recycling yield via new technologies for material extraction post-usage)
- Enablers, which reduce the transaction cost or improve the ease of pursuing more inner circles, which typically exhibit higher potential of keeping materials longer and at higher level of quality in use (e.g. material tagging)
- Business models, which aim to improve the economic potential of (private sector) actors to choose more circular configiurations over the classical make-take-dispose linear value chains (e.g. reaping return of investing in durability of products by moving away from a sales to a performance-based commercial model)
