Assessing Product Circularity in Practice: Insights from Industry

Abstract

The use of the concept of ‘circularity’ and Circular Economy (CE), and within it, product circularity within government, policy, industry, and academia has grown exponentially in the last decade. However, despite this, there is a lack of harmonization on circularity and CE definitions within the literature and a gap in knowledge on how they are understood and implemented within industry. As such, 21 in-depth qualitative interviews were completed with companies that claimed to have a core circular economy business strategy with the objective to gain insight into how circularity is currently understood and is being implemented at a product level and measured by Industry. This research was undertaken as part of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 project, ORIENTING. The data collected from the interviews was analysed using a thematic coding methodology to 1) gain insights into how product circularity (PC) is understood by industry and identify PC strategies currently being implemented across various sectors; 2) identify barriers for implementation that can lead to solutions for remanufacturing, reuse, refurbish and repair and new ways for production and consumption, and 3) contribute to the development of methodologies and tools for measuring product circularity beyond recycled inflows and outflows. A key finding from the interviews was the lack of harmonization of the concept of circularity and CE within industry, and thus how to implement this at a product level across different sectors. Moreover, the surge in methodologies that seek to quantitively assess product circularity performance for internal decision making and external communications, have until recently, focused primarily on assessing the use of recycled material inflows and outflows; thus, positioning circularity as synonymous to recycling. The paper also shows how measuring use phase related product circularity issues e.g., repair, reuse, etc. is still in the early stages due to a lack of data ownership by companies.