Product Design for a Circular Economy: A case study towards a circular luminaire

Product Design for a Circular Economy: A case study towards a circular luminaire

Van den Berg, M.R.

Bakker, C.A. (mentor)
Van der Grinten, B. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

Master of Science Integrated Product Design

2014-07-11

In general the majority of the current economy is a linear economy based on a ‘take-make-dispose” model that relies on easily accessible resources and energy. This creates huge amounts of waste at end of life impacting nature and society. Furthermore resource scarcity is increasingly becoming an issue impacting price and availability of products. The linear model is increasingly harder to sustain in the current world and therefore a radical change of the system is desired. Circular Economy (CE) is a framework focusing on resource and value recovery to systematically design out waste. In contrast to other sustainability frameworks it explicitly includes a business approach. The framework involves decoupling wealth from resource usage by product life extension, using renewable energy and diversity for resilient and productive systems. The framework can be seen as a solution for the end of the age of cheap resources and fossil fuels. CE is primarily promoted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which published three reports that primarily focus on the business case. For circular product design there is little information available. Therefore this thesis looks at what CE means for circular product design and how that can be applied by use of a case study. A Circular Design Model is proposed that identifies five main characteristics for circular design: future proof, disassembly, service, remake and recycling. Based on these five main characteristics various guidelines from literature were gathered and combined to create a Circular Design Guideline List. The list shows all relevant guidelines that can be taken into account. Based on the guideline list three tools are presented that can be used to apply circular design: a Circular Design Vision, A Circular Design Spider Map and a Circular Design Scorecard. Depending on the situation and user a simpler or a more extensive tool might be more suited. The tools have been developed by and used in a case study of the design of a circular indoor luminaire. With an understanding of LED developments and products analysis opportunities are identified for a circular indoor luminaire. A concept design has been developed that shows the application of circular design. For the concept design the main characteristics are: ease of access to the LED module and driver, easy disassembly and modularity.

circular economy
circular design
luminaire
lighting
design guidelines

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:523db269-2c95-4566-bd69-eeb83b466774

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Van den Berg, M.R.