A methodological approach to design products for multiple lifecycles in the context of circular manufacturing systems

It is estimated that the adaptation of the Circular Economy approach can yield material cost savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year for the EU and can result in huge environmental benefits. To tap this potential, the manufacturing industry needs to take a circular approach, where the products are designed intentionally to be used for multiple lifecycles. However, there is a lack of methodologies to date that can support such an approach. To fill this gap, this research has proposed a novel methodological approach that can support designing products for multiple lifecycles to keep the products as well as the components and the materials at their highest utility and value at all times. This research has identified that there is a strong synergy among the concepts of product design strategies, product obsolescence and product end-of-life options. Taking this synergy as the foundation and adopting modular architectures in the product design and development process, lifecycle planning can be performed for products that will sustain multiple lifecycles. This research is performed in two steps: first, the research review process is used to explore the knowledge base in the field of product design methodologies and based on the insights from the literature a novel methodological approach is proposed; second, a case example is used to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodological approach. •Introduces a novel methodological approach that can support designing products for multiple lifecycles.•Applicability of the methodological approach is tested using a washing machine as the case study.•The methodological approach takes a system approach to plan the lifecycles of a product.