Conference Agenda

This paper examines the role of remanufacturing in healthcare as a key circular design strategy, particularly for medical devices, assessing its socio-technical, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability. Through a detailed case of ultrasound catheters, it demonstrates how remanufacturing can lead to resource conservation, cost savings, and enhanced product lifecycles in health care without compromising quality and patient safety. The study argues for systemic changes in healthcare practices to fully integrate remanufacturing, underscoring its role beyond a technical solution.

The landscape of reuse and repair (R&R) activities for manufactured products is vibrant: new European laws, research projects, local initiatives. Our aim is to capture the current and future challenges of the field through an industrial workshop held at the ICED23 conference. A collective reflection was conducted with three French stakeholders: a Product Responsibility Organization, a social and solidarity organization, and a private company producing water-driven dosing pumps. The study results in a multi-level perspective on the R&R value chain and four R&R future scenarios.

While the “useful life” of products plays an important role in the balance of sustainability and lifecycle assessment, the concept of durability, as the main measure of useful life, is still ill-defined. This paper critically considers the limitations of the current definitions and approaches to durability, by reflecting on the complex interactions of the viewpoints of engineering design teams, users, society and business economics. A new definition is proposed for durability relating to the useful life goals for a product within its techno-socio-economic context.

This study, conducted with Northvolt, examines battery system recyclability and disassembly dynamics. It introduces indices for material and product recyclability, along with disassembly time assessment. The goal is to create a design tool to streamline the evaluation of battery disassembly, aiding in designing recyclable and serviceable components. These methodologies serve as a blueprint for enhancing battery systems' overall sustainability and circularity design, presenting a base for future product development in alignment with environmental and economic objectives.

Reusable packaging systems are emerging as a promising solution to combat the growing issue of packaging waste. While consumers generally recognise the environmental advantages of reuse, their actual reuse behaviours may result in insufficient reuse and an unintentional undermining of sustainability efforts. We conducted two creative workshops, created a large number of potential design interventions and further developed them into 16 design strategies for consumers' continued usage of RPSs through thematic analysis. These findings can inspire future research and the development of RPSs.

To enable the circular economy paradigm, it is important to design easy-to-disassemble products. A new method, known as Design for Circular Disassembly (DfCD), has been proposed to enhance product disassembly performances toward circularity. The method was tested on a small-sized product, showing promising results. However, its applicability to medium-sized products remains unclear. The goal of this article is to assess the effectiveness of DfCD on medium-sized products, particularly washing machines. Results showed DfCD can be extended to medium-sized products, increasing model complexity.