Remake, Reuse, Repair, Recycle

Full course description

One of the great challenges of our time is to transition away from a linear to a circular economy for both biological (“renewable”) and technical (“finite”) materials. The current make-use-dispose needs to be replaced by circular loops that keep these resources in the system as long as possible. To this end, loops of circular economy have been proposed for both systems.

In essence, once a product (composed of materials) is in the market, creating circularity is achieved by first extending as much as possible the effective use of the product (Share, out of scope for this course) or the product lifetime (Maintain/Prolong and Refurbish/Remanufacture).  When this has reached its maximum capacity, only then should we allow the product to go to end-of-life, at which point we keep the materials in the system via Recycle. These loops correspond to 3 of the “Rs” which are the topics of this course, namely Reuse, Repair and Recycle respectively. The fourth R is found at start-of-life, before the product is even made and is Remake (sometimes called Redesign), which considers how to make new products more suitable for the Circular Economy. In this course, we will explore the meaning and implications of these four Rs and apply them via several industrial case studies.