Design for recycling. Analysis of recycling consideration into design processes and future prospects

Synthesis

Disclaimer: The content of this publication is based on the state of knowledge and the regulatory framework in force at the time of publication of the documents.

Context and objectives of the study

The study on design for recycling was conducted in a context marked by increasing regulatory and societal constraints surrounding the circular economy. For several years now, the European Union and its Member States have been stepping up their ambitions in terms of « material efficiency », with ambitious targets for reuse, recycling and recovery of secondary raw materials through some delegated acts from Ecodesign directive or the new ESPR regulation (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation). These guidelines are directly linked to issues of supply, dependence on strategic resources and environmental impact reduction of products.

In this context, manufacturers are being called upon to transform their practices to integrate end-of-life considerations into product design. However, this integration remains complex, as it involves reconciling sometimes contradictory considerations: technical and aesthetic performance, economic constraints, consumer expectations, time lag between manufacturing and effective recycling, and recycling constraints.

The overall objective of the study is to determine how design for recycling can be better taken into account in product development processes, and to explore the possibility of using a generic method to support designers. This ambition is based on several sub-objectives: gather current practices, analyse the scope of existing regulations and standards, identify and classify available recommendations, and finally identify concrete propositions for the appropriation of the subject by actors in the value chain. It should be noted that this study focuses on analysing the existing situation (state of the art) in France and Europe. It does not therefore seek to develop technical solutions or resolve technical and economic obstacles. 

The scope of the study covers a specific range of products, selected on the basis of the sector of activity of RECORD members, the presence of Extended Producers Responsability-EPR schemes and the maturity of recycling channels. The types of products selected are handiwork and gardening items, heavy rolling equipment, sports and leisure items, electrical and electronic equipment, construction products (finishing work), oils, batteries, tyres, toys, furniture, textiles and footwear, packaging and vehicles.

The methodological approach adopted consists of four main stages. 

First, a survey was conducted to gather feedback from stakeholders in the value chain, including Manufacturers, EPR Schemes, Recyclers and Institutional stakeholders. 

Next, an in-depth analysis of the framing tools was conducted, covering regulations, standards and certifications related to design. This work was supplemented by an analysis of the capacity of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool to support designers in their choices.

A third step consisted of gathering and structuring the available recommendations on design for recycling, cross-referencing more than 115 sources and identifying nearly 950 recommendations. 

Finally, a forward-looking study was conducted to build the basis for a transversal method that goes beyond sectoral logic and identifies levers for action to improve the consideration of recycling from the early stages of product development. 

The study therefore aims to provide a consolidated overview of the current state of design for recycling and to identify the conditions that will enable practices to evolve.

Eco-design for recycling: a topic still rarely put into practice

The survey results reveal that recyclability is increasingly being taken into account in eco-design approaches, but remains marginal in practice. Three-quarters of the manufacturers surveyed say they incorporate this criterion, but often in an incomplete and ad hoc manner, without a structured company-wide strategy.

The low number of responses obtained (33 out of more than 150 qualified contacts) is revealing in itself. This low participation rate seems to show that the subject is not yet perceived as a priority by the majority of stakeholders. It also highlights the difficulty of identifying, within organisations, the people with the expertise and legitimacy to respond. Thus, eco-design for recycling still appears to be a secondary concern, concentrated in certain specialised teams rather than spread across all products development stakeholders.

For manufacturers, recyclability is primarily a response to regulatory requirements or a desire to secure materials as part of a proactive circular economy approach. Product performance, cost and time constraints still largely dominate decision-making, and consumer/customer demand is not a determining factor. Several manufacturers acknowledge that design choices are still too often disconnected from the realities of available recycling processes.

Recyclers have a similar finding: they see a large number of products designed without consideration for disassembly, component separation or the absence of disruptor materials for recycling.

EPR Schemes share this analysis but emphasise above all a lack of information flow and the ability to address the actors in charge of design.

All stakeholders view future regulatory tools (ESPR, Digital Product Passport - DPP) positively in terms of their ability to bring about change, even though the detailed content of these regulations at product level is not yet known. Paradoxically, existing and therefore enforceable regulatory requirements (Environmental Quality and Characteristics sheets - QCE, modulated fees from EPR) are perceived by manufacturers as offering little incentive.

Despite these limitations, converging levers are emerging. Stakeholders agree on the need to:

• integrating recycling constraints into design at an earlier stage,
• strengthen the sharing of information on the materials and processes used,
• seeking simplification and stability in compositions,
• regulate certain practices more strictly through legislation,
• and to better train designers on issues related to recyclability.
  
  

Regulations, standards and certifications: tools that are still struggling to transform design

Regulations: a dense but ineffective framework

Analysis of existing regulations shows that they play a structuring role but are still insufficient to transform design choices related with recycling. Three main types of constraints can be distinguished:

• Direct constraints, such as the prohibition of certain substances or the requirement for disassembly. These constraints remain limited and are not necessarily implemented with recyclability as the primary objective: the issue of substances is primarily one of toxicity and ecotoxicity risks, and disassembly is primarily intended to address product repairability.
• Indirect constraints, such as the obligation to draw up prevention plans or display recyclability rates, which can validate eco-design actions but do not guide or constrain the designer.
• Information-related constraints, which require data to be transmitted to consumers or end-of-life stakeholders.

These measures provide an important framework, but their actual scope remains limited. They are often characterised by obligations of means rather than obligations of results, which reduces their ability to directly influence design. The information provided is often too generic to be translated into precise technical specifications by product development teams.

Standards: a diverse landscape but limited uptake

Several categories of standards relating to design for recycling have been analysed. Eco-design standards, such as ISO 14006 or ISO/TR 14062, offer a global methodological framework for integrating environmental considerations into product development. They highlight the importance of taking end-of-life into account from the design stage, but remain general in nature. They do not provide technical specifications that can be directly used by designers.

Standards for assessing recyclability, such as EN 45555 for electrical and electronic equipment or ISO 22628 for vehicles, aim to measure a product's recycling potential in a standardised way. They are therefore a valuable means of harmonising assessments and comparing products. However, they are more of a tool for verifying performance downstream than a guide for guiding design upstream.

Circularity standards, such as the ISO 59000 series, broaden the scope of circular economy models by addressing repairability, reusability and recyclability. However, while these standards provide a basis for establishing KPIs to measure performance and indicate "generic" design directions for recycling, they do not provide levers that can be directly applied by designers.

Finally, Life Cycle Assessment standards (notably the ISO 1404X series) make it possible to integrate the benefits of recycling into the overall environmental assessment. They guarantee the scientific rigour of LCAs, but their complexity and the variability of results limit their use as direct support for design decisions (see section on LCA below).

Overall, these standards constitute a rich and potentially useful body of knowledge, but they are still not widely adopted by designers and are difficult to translate into directly operational tools to guide design choices.

Certifications and labels: partial coverage of recyclability

An analysis of voluntary certifications and labels reveals a limited number of schemes directly focused on recyclability. Three of them, including RecyClass, are specifically dedicated to this issue, but with a limited scope: they focus almost exclusively on plastics and adopt an approach that is primarily centred on packaging.

Furthermore, the study reveals the absence of a truly structured multi-sector framework: only two documents cover several sectors, including Cradle to Cradle certification. This situation reflects the difficulty of harmonising rules between industries, each of which develops its own standards for its own sectors, with highly variable levels of requirements.

Existing systems are logically product-specific, given the diversity of recycling channels. However, few of them deal exclusively with recyclability. When they do address the subject, it is often through other aspects of the life cycle, such as raw materials or the recyclability of product packaging, rather than through an end-of-life approach. Finally, even when end-of-life is explicitly addressed in a dedicated sub-section, it is not approached exclusively from the perspective of recyclability, but often in relation to other issues such as disassembly or substance management.

Nevertheless, these measures remain of interest: they provide technical benchmarks, enhance the value of companies in the market and stimulate progress in practices by providing a framework that can become more demanding over time. 

Thus, while the regulatory, normative and certification arsenal seems abundant, its ability to truly transform design practices remains limited.

Life Cycle Assessment, a tool that is currently limited in its ability to guide design towards recyclability

LCA is the principle tool for assessing the overall environmental impact of a product. It incorporates all the stages of a product's life cycle, including end-of-life and therefore recycling. It also allows several scenarios to be compared, making it a useful tool for designers. However, its usefulness as a tool to support design for recyclabilty has significant limitations.

The findings of the study highlight several key points:

• LCA is perceived as an expert tool that is difficult to use in a rapid design context. It provides more of an overview of impacts than operational support for specific choices on the topic of recyclability.
• The results vary significantly depending on the modelling methods used, in particular the depth of the cut-off points (boundary between recycling of a material/recycled material) and whether or not recycling benefits are included. This variability makes it difficult for designers to interpret the results.
• A lack of data specific to the scope of product recycling (by sector) in the most widely used databases makes this stage one of the least well modelled today. 

Analyses thus confirm that, while LCA remains essential for understanding environmental issues as a whole, it does not currently provide effective guidance for design decisions aimed at improving recyclability.

Designing for recycling: numerous recommendations but for a limited number of sectors

The survey identified more than 950 recommendations for recycling, drawn from around 100 sources. These recommendations are listed, organised and characterised in a specific Excel file attached to this study, and reserved for RECORD members, which allows designers to easily search for recommendations based on several parameters, including their scope of action, design issues and the precision of the recommendation. This corpus illustrates the diversity of existing recommendations, but also their strong concentration in a few sectors. Packaging, electrical and electronic equipment, and to a lesser extent textiles, footwear and furniture account for the majority of recommendations. Other sectors, such as sports equipment, toys, tyres and oils, appear to be poorly covered.

The recommendations cover recurring themes, but are truly relevant and actionable when they are contextualised and broken down by product type according to the recycling channels managing them. Although most of the recommendations are formulated at the sectoral level, the recurring themes from a cross-cutting perspective are: 

• Prioritise homogeneous and single-material materials.
• Avoid substances or additives that interfere with recycling.
• Design for ease of disassembly and separability.
• Strengthen traceability and information throughout the value chain.

The analysis also highlights that these recommendations are often directly linked to the current state of recycling industries. They respond to present needs but do little to anticipate future technological developments. As a result, they appear relevant in the short term but risk losing their effectiveness when designers want to take a step back and innovate beyond current industry practices.

Towards a generic method for designing for recycling

Based on these findings, the study proposes laying the foundations for a generic method for designing for recycling. The aim is to move beyond the current approach, where each sector defines its own recommendations, to offer designers a cross-cutting framework that can be applied to different products.

Conclusions and prospects for better consideration of recyclability in design processes

The study concludes that designing for recycling remains marginal in manufacturers' approaches. The low number of responses to the survey illustrates the low priority given to this issue, even among players already committed to eco-design. Recycling is not systematically integrated into design choices, which are hampered by a lack of knowledge, the difficulty of promoting this issue to customers or consumers, and the preponderance of other technical and economic constraints. Current regulatory obligations, which focus on communicating recyclability rates or managing specific substances and dismantling, appear to offer little incentive. Future regulations such as the ESPR and the DDP are raising expectations, but their content remains uncertain. At the time of finalising this study, the first delegated acts were not yet available. At the same time, existing standards do not specifically address design for recycling, and labels or certifications only touch on the subject very partially, with the exception of a few initiatives targeting packaging. Finally, while there are many recommendations, they are concentrated on a limited number of mature sectors and do not yet significantly change design practices. In this context, recyclability still appears to be a secondary criterion.

To overcome these obstacles, there are several levers that offer very different levels of influence and ease of implementation. The study lists the following propositions:

The development of closed loops, where a sector recycles its own products to reuse parts or materials, is a powerful lever for encouraging designers to evolve their designs with a view to recycling, with the aim of maximising material recovery at the lowest cost. However, this faces constraints in terms of mass production and the logic of collective end-of-life product management by sector. 

Regulatory tools appear to be key: expanding existing obligations and defining numerical thresholds, rather than simply qualitative references, are identified as necessary. Incentive mechanisms such as bonuses and penalties could also play a role, provided they are extended at European level, adapted to the realities of the sectors and significant enough to influence design choices. 

Information sharing between designers and recyclers must be strengthened, especially in emerging sectors, taking into account the constraints faced by all players in the value chain from end-of-life to the most downstream stages of recycling. 

Raising awareness and training customers, whether consumers or professional buyers, could help increase demand and encourage manufacturers to make progress. Finally, for long-life products, the issue of recyclability needs to be approached differently: the long time frame calls for consideration of changes to the recycling tools themselves, supported by partnerships between manufacturers and recyclers.

Ultimately, the study shows that while recyclability remains a marginal criterion today, it could become a key design factor provided that all levers – information, training, regulation, economic incentives and cooperation between stakeholders – are mobilised simultaneously.