An analysis of design strategies for circular economy through life cycle assessment

The goal of pursuing the circular economy (CE) is spreading more and more in industry, also driven by the introduction of new regulations, considerably afecting product design. However, a quantitative and rigorous evaluation of the environmental impacts of the results obtained by diferent design strategies used to implementing CE is missing in the literature. Those available only evaluate certain aspects of the life cycle of few products, belonging to specifc application felds, in a qualitative way or they refer only to the global warming potential. This study provides a quantitative assessment of the environmental impacts reductions arising from the application of some common design strategies for implementing diferent CE options (e.g. reuse, waste to energy, remanufacturing), by using some standard indicators. The results were obtained by manually analysing 156 selected case studies of comparative life cycle assessment (LCA), extracted from 136 scientifc articles. In them, the environmental impacts of design solutions for CE are compared with those of other solutions were wastes are not exploited. The obtained results have been used to evaluate the diferent design strategies for CE and to hierarchize them based on environmental sustainability of the solutions associated with them. In addition, an economic evaluation of the strategies, based on the life cycle costing methodology and exploiting the data available in the same articles, was also provided. Among the main achievements, it was found that the hierarchy of the CE options, pursued by the design strategies, to improve environmental sustainability is diferent from that provided by other studies. In addition, the environmental benefts associated with the diferent CE options strictly depend by the applied design strategies and the considered products.