"Product design is a way to provide a solution to satisfy a user's needs. The design process is essential to creating the product: technological choices made at this time ensure success and define the cost of a product. For instance, about 80% of the total manufacturing cost of a product results from decisions that designers have made during the design process. Generally, we consider that the total cost of 95% is determined in the early product design and development phases. The actual cost, however, is very low in these phases, typically up to 20%. These actual costs only start to be seen as soon as manufacturing. The second strong cost realization is during the use and end of life phases. Consequently, this figure immediately justifies the statement made previously, claiming that investment in early product development phases pays off later in the lifetime of the product. In the traditional business model, the producer's cost responsibility is limited to all the development phases that happen at the producer's side, that is to say, from specification to manufacturing. Users are cost-responsible during usage and end of life. New and Emerging models, however, demand that producers take over cost responsibility of the product over a significantly extended portion of its lifetime, including usage and end-of-life phases. Obviously, this shift will have fundamental implications on the responsibility of designers as well. Product design is a sequential activity. Considering the design process as a sequential activity is equivalent to considering the design process as the sum of its local optimums. But such a sum of numerous local optimums is, in general, far from the global optimum. As the earth's resources are limited, we have to think about the environmental impacts of products as soon as possible. The earliest stage where one can think about this is at the start of product design. Product design strategies should consider the entire life cycle of a product. They help to identify measures that you may want to consider to reduce the environmental impacts of products you are involved in designing. These statements are more suggestions and questions rather than solutions. They are a set of general guidelines from which you have to select the ones that are the more relevant to your particular circumstances. If we consider the life cycle phases of a product, we can identify several principles. For resource acquisition, you should consider using a minimal amount of material, Using renewable materials, using recycled or recyclable material flow, using waste by-products, and avoiding hazardous or toxic substances. As far as manufacturing is concerned, it could be a good idea to minimize using multi-material flows in one product, avoid material waste, reduce the number of components, Integrate functionalities together, simplify product assemblies, and select low-impact materials and processes. With regards to packaging and transport, here we can reduce product weight and packaging, select the most efficient form of transportation, use reusable and or recyclable packaging and minimize the number of packaging materials, maximize packaging efficiency, reuse existing packaging when possible. During the use phase, it is possible to minimize energy consumption, minimize consumables or maximize the reuse of consumables, plan for ongoing efficiency improvements. And finally, for the product's end-of-life, you should design for extended product lifetime and durability, design for reuse and remanufacture, design for easy disassembly, design for recyclability, design for degradability. This article will only focus on some of the items presented here. Thus, we will talk about product design in relation to recycling and remanufacturing, a case study about product design for reuse and refurbishment in an IT refurbishment company in Ireland, efficient production, product chain integration, policy, the substitution of materials, and circular procurement.

The European Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, WEEE, encourages us to promote the design and production of electrical and electronic equipment, notably in view of facilitating reuse, dismantling and recovery of WEEE, its components and materials. This requires that the product designer considers the various recycling processes in order to ensure compatibility with existing recycling practices. Various processes can be used to recycle an electronic product. Let's take the example of a mobile phone. After the phone has been collected as WEEE, several strategies are possible. The first one would be to reuse the phone, either without any modifications, through refurbishing, or alternatively through remanufacturing. Which approach is adopted, the phone would end up with a new or extended product lifecycle. The second strategy which can be used is to disassemble the product and then reuse some parts in other remanufactured products or to sell these parts to other remanufacturers or potential customers. It would also enable us to manually segregate the various materials before sending them to the proper recycling solution. The third alternative is recycling. This requires that all polluting parts be removed and properly disposed of within the phone or appliance. What remains can then be shredded and materials automatically separated before recycling. A fraction of the product which cannot be recycled would be sent to the fourth strategy, incineration. Nowadays, incineration enables the production of energy, in addition to reducing the volume occupied by waste. Finally, the last strategy, which must only be used when none of the others is feasible, is landfilling. In this case, waste is buried in a sanitary landfill, and nothing is recovered from it. Now that we know how a product can be processed during its end of life, what concepts can be used during product design? This can be done thanks to dematerialization, such as the product-service system. Other strategies can be found in the guidelines: extending the lifespan of the product, making it easier to repair, etc. It may be impossible to reuse or recycle a fraction of a product if incompatible materials cannot be separated. Therefore, designing a product whose parts can be easily disassembled is very important. To do so, designers have to imagine how recyclers work in order to facilitate the identification of elements to be disassembled, improve their accessibility, facilitate their separation, make them easier to handle and facilitate pollution. Design for disassembly implies the use of removable joints. Thus, companies have developed guidelines for their design teams. However, this design strategy implies many constraints, such as how to select and prioritize the recommendations? Are they relevant when the product is shredded? Because disassembly might be too expensive to be viable, shredding followed by sorting is a widely employed strategy. When designing for shredding, it is important to facilitate the release of the various materials; facilitate the separability of the materials after shredding. Some companies, such as car manufacturers, use tables to check the compatibility of materials. In the example of plastics sorted according to their density, separability rules are easily defined. However, not all products are suitably designed for shredding. A door lock, for example, is made of recyclable materials, but these will not be easily recycled after shredding. In a similar way, a coil of an electric engine will come out as an inseparable mix of steel and copper. It is possible to go further by mixing both of the above approaches, design for disassembly and shredding, according to the economic and practical constraints. However, this requires the product designer to have a precise knowledge of how recyclers actually work. Indeed, why design a product which is easy to disassemble if, in fact, it will be shredded? Or not even collected and send to a recycler but landfilled?

Remanufacturing is the process whereby products are restored to a useful life after disassembly. It includes inspection, sorting, cleaning, reprocessing, reassembly, checking, and testing. A few design principles remanufacturing regarding disassembly are identical to those for recycling presented in the previous video. However, remanufacturing is different from repairing and refurbishing, as products need to be upgraded or modernized to fit the market demand or to satisfy the customer's requirements. Therefore, remanufacturing requires that the second life of the product is kept in mind while designing the product during its first lifetime. This can be done using the following three principles. The first principle, technological equipment parts are targeted without any properties of dissipation or failure. The second principle, the technology to bring in original shape, condition, and functionality for the product, is ensured to be available. And third principle, some of the parts in the equipment that can be removed and set up, according to the relevant norms and standards, are considered in advance. It is impossible to realize the full benefit of remanufacturing without considering the product design. In fact, a similar or a superior level of quality could be met if the entire system is planned to be manufactured. Design for remanufacturing can be viewed from a number of different perspectives, such as design for remanufacturing. It aims to facilitate any of the steps involved in remanufacturing. But also the product strategy, including marketing or reverse logistics. Design for remanufacturing also focuses on the detailed engineering of the product in terms of remanufacturing. It is a combination of the design process whereby an item is designed to facilitate remanufacture. The objective of design for remanufacturing is to enhance the re-manufacturability of the product. To do so, technical factors such as disassembly, access, assembly, as well as, the identification of the resistance and durability of the product must be measured. In addition, some market-related factors also need to be considered, such as the customer perception, the product life cycle thinking, or the design for the upgrade. Some operational factors like motivation and cooperation of suppliers and customers, as well as the type of management, may intervene with the process at any stage. Some examples of these issues include: the use of non-durable material, which may break during recovery, or that may deteriorate during the first life cycle. Other examples include the joining methods which prevent the separation of subcomponents during disassembly operation and the addition of features of the product that restrict the upgrading or which necessitate the use of banned substance or processing methods and/or components that may be costly to recover. Additionally, some parameters are beyond the designer's control, such as demand, fashion, and manufacturers' prohibitive activities. Other methods and tools can be found to help design re-manufacturable products. In particular, the modularization methodology drives product architecture into easy to disassemble modules based on functional and physical independencies. In this context, functional independence means that a given module performs its function independently from the product in which it is applied. Physical independence means that the module interface allows ease of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly. A second issue that designers face with respect to design for remanufacturing is the use of parts as subcomponents that are not originally designed with this end-of-life strategy in mind. This issue is similar to the repurposing of products mentioned in the lesson about reusing and repurposing. Finally, to design a successful re-manufacturable product, it is important to consider overheads such as the cost of operations. Indeed, disassembly and control of taken-back products can hardly be automated. Labor costs will therefore always be incurred and should be kept as low as possible. This implies a precise planning process for reverse logistics and detailed procedures for remanufacturing products, such as the use of simple connections in design or of identical parts to facilitate their recognition.

In the production process, the forming of waste should be kept at a minimum. This not only saves resources and therefore costs, but it also saves waste transportation and disposal costs. The reduction of waste in the process increases the efficiency of that process. In production basically, three types of waste are formed. The first one is the products that are not according to specification. The second one has wasted materials that are directly related to the process. Examples are cutting waste or spent catalysts. The third type of waste is waste that is indirectly related to the process. Examples are packaging waste of raw materials or half products, or waste from personnel, such as canteen waste. The first type of waste is formed by a substandard performed process. This can be caused by an overproduction of products or parts that can't be used or sold, or the products that are not according to specifications also named the off-spec products or defects. he cause of overproduction can be unreliable machines, the changeover time being too high or the defect rate too high, which is the reason for the operator to make extra parts. The cause of defects could be poor quality control or test specifications, inadequate manufacturing methods, substandard materials, skill, or poor debugging. By improving the production process, overproduction and defects can be diminished. The production process is improved by the continuous cycle of plan-do-check and act, as described in the ISO 9000 quality management systems standards. The second type of waste is the waste material directly related to the process. This waste can be minimized by adjusting the design or production process in cases the waste cannot be prevented. Examples of these types of waste are cutting residues or spent catalysts. In most cases, this type of waste is sold as a secondary resource, such as metal scrap or wood cuttings for the plywood industry. In some cases, the material is sold as a specific resource for a specific product, such as sulphuric acid from the oil and gas industry for the chemical industry. To find customers for these types of residues, a simple market study could already have some results. An Internet search, for example, on electronic components for electrotechnical custom-made projects, shows traders in these components next to the usual scrap dealers. These traders in components give a much better price, usually 10 up to 50 times in some cases, due to the reuse of the components instead of recycling. For complex industrial materials, opportunities can be found by setting up meetings with industries on exchanging their materials. When done by an independent and trustworthy party, such as a branch organization or a governmental body, this could lead to exchanges of industrial materials, specifically chemicals. The third type of waste is the materials that in older days ended up in the residual waste bin. Examples are packaging material, canteen and office waste, course waste that is formed on occasions as old office furniture or obsolete ICT equipment. The regular waste can be separated into different fractions. Metal, wood, and organic material are well known, but also plastics are being collected. When certain types of plastics are kept clean and dry in a separate container, these might bring in extra cash instead of extra waste management costs. By organizing waste separation in a company, it will be more likely that products containing critical raw materials as electronic components will be kept separate as well. The key to waste separation in companies is to keep the bin as close as possible to the employee. Convenience is the magic word. It is, of course, necessary that the management supports this by informing the personnel, arranging space for collected materials, and giving employees time to handle the different types of waste. Course material that occasionally leaves the company should be checked first on reusability. For example, for old office furniture, there are traders, as well as for laptops, computers and mobile phones. Even worn furniture is taken back in some cases for refurbishment. In a Dutch case, a hospital sent its old office chairs to the refurbisher, saving 90% on the purchase of new chairs. Try to find out yourself how to make cash from what your colleagues see as waste. Don't waste your waste!

The main reason for considering the whole production chain is that it involves several factors that may not use the same data or even, sometimes, the same language. Thus, one person will talk about engineering issues, while another will consider environmental impacts, money, or customer satisfaction. This lack of understanding may be explained away by a lack of overview of the product chain amongst the actors. Whatever the cause, a certain lack of trust may arise due to these conflicting strategies. And this is only one example of internal problems. When including suppliers and other external stakeholders, things may become even more difficult. Product chain integration is a strategy aimed at preventing problems such as these. An integrated product chain can be defined as an association of internal stakeholders such as designers, product engineers, finance or marketing officers, and external stakeholders like customers and suppliers. They work together to optimize their collective performance in the creation, distribution, and support of an end product. The costs, complexities, and risks of integrating an integrated production chain can be similar to the costs of integrating and operating a corporation of comparable size. Some of the major costs are time devoted to managing, training, support, investment in product chain integration software and compatible information systems, opportunity costs, and risks of production stoppages. Because the extent of interconnectedness and interdependence makes highly integrated chains increasingly vulnerable to disruptions, the risk of production stoppages should not be overlooked. It is, therefore, crucial to spend time gaining the full participation of the relevant people when starting such a project. More generally, internal training would also be needed in order to make the understanding and acceptance of product chain integration as large as possible. Thus organizing the entire supply chain enable to get feedback from other stakeholders and better plan for improvements. However, this needs to involve many stakeholders with different backgrounds, goals, and cultures. This can be complex and should be kept as simple as possible and be supported by governmental incentives. Finally, the matter of product chain integration in relation to WEEE formation illustrates. Indeed, electronic equipment is often an assembly of many sub-components, made from numerous materials and coming from various suppliers. Under these circumstances, it is certainly impossible for a company to anticipate the impacts of the WEEE its products will become without a deep and trustful relationship with its suppliers. It is unfortunately impossible to provide a simple answer to this complex issue. Many factors are to be considered, especially in a globalized product chain, such as location, size, the complexity of products, knowledge. However, if we consider the criticality of the materials involved and their effects on the environment and society, it seems important that stakeholders tend to work together on this issue.

Designing for reuse and preparation for reuse attempts to optimize the "use" phase of a product for greater resource efficiency in an attempt to address the unprecedented pressure we are currently placing on critical raw materials, resources, and the manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, the design for disassembly should help in the separation of materials for greater recycling efficiency. In many cases, poor designs could easily be addressed with the adoption of new product standards for reparability and durability at national and international levels. Recommendations for better product designs include the following. Use modular construction. Minimize the number of disassembly operations. Minimize the number of connections. Use tools as simple and generic as possible. Connectors shall be resistant to damage and reusable. The EU Ecolabel is a voluntary label promoting environmental excellence which can be trusted. It identifies products and services that have a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle, from the extraction of raw material through to production, use, and disposal. These identify specific product design features which must be incorporated into a product in order to achieve the label. For example, EcoLabel recommendations for televisions recommend that for end-of-life televisions, they should have "easy disassembly of the system unit taken into account in the design, with fixtures that are easily accessible with commonly available tools". To improve durability, the regulation recommends that: "the availability of compatible replacement parts shall be guaranteed for seven years from the time that production ceases". For computers and laptops, recommendations include designing the product as a whole for upgrade and repair so that a set of listed components are easily accessible and exchangeable using universal tools. Furthermore, rechargeable batteries should be easy to extract from the product in order to replace them, as defined by the number of steps and types of tools required. In the next revision of the EU Ecolabel standard, batteries in laptops and portable notebooks are explicitly focused on in this respect. It is proposed that there will be restrictions on the use of glue and welding in the product for the assembly of batteries and the establishment of a maximum number of steps required for their disassembly. The Eco-design directive strives to create a framework for defining requirements for the environmentally friendly design of energy-using products and energy-related products placed on the EU market, which are mandatory. The directive requires that the recommendations apply to product groups where at least 200,000 units will be affected by these recommendations, that the measures will have a significant environmental impact if they are implemented for this product group and that the products present significant potential for improvement in terms of its environmental impact without entailing high costs. While also taking a life cycle approach, up until now, however, the focus of these solutions has largely been on improving energy efficiency in the use phase rather than on improving material efficiency. Under the current iterations of their implementing measures, it does not provide concrete measures on key product design features which would improve or extend product lifetime or reuse potential. It does not yet make disassembly easier to achieve and thus be relevant to critical raw materials. However, it does have the potential to play a bigger role in this area and would be mandatory if implemented. In an effort to support greater product reuse in Europe, the EU has introduced the waste hierarchy as part of the waste framework directive. It cites waste prevention, including direct reuse, as the ideal waste management strategy, with preparation for reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal as subsequent tiers in the hierarchy. As well as setting collection targets, under the WEEE directive, product design should not deliberately hinder reuse or recycling. However, it has yet to provide any concrete insight into what such design features might be and does not include any stipulations with regard to the recovery of critical raw materials. Europe's public authorities are major consumers. By using their purchasing power to choose environmentally friendly goods, services and works, they can make an important contribution to sustainable consumption and production. Although green public procurement is a voluntary instrument, it has the potential to enable a more resource-efficient approach to critical raw materials if EU public bodies begin to consider them when procuring goods and services. To be effective, green public procurement requires the inclusion of clear and verifiable environmental criteria for products and services in the public procurement process, so favoring refurbished or remanufactured goods would be a practical way to support the critical raw materials agenda. Alternatively, they should favor products with the EU Eco-Label when available or look to favor business models such as product-service systems in their procurement practices. Likewise, when procuring waste management services, public bodies should seek to favor services that prioritize the reuse of critical raw material-containing products. The challenge of furthering take-up by more public sector bodies so that green public procurement becomes common practice still remains. In conclusion, we have looked at some of the key aspects of EU policy as they relate to product design and critical raw materials.

Substitution is the direct replacement of one material by another in a given application or process. One way to replace a material is to substitute that material for another material employing entirely new technology. A common example is the substitution of incandescent light bulbs, which relied on tungsten by LEDs. Sometimes substitution can go even further and create new business models. It is what happens with product-service systems. The main reason for substituting critical raw materials is the procurement and sustainability issues that we have considered in other lessons. Several critical raw materials are key ingredients for many products used in high-tech applications. These applications and their material components are relevant for many industries, such as renewable energy production, electronics, automotive, etc. Four main sustainable strategies are required at the same time to mitigate supply chain risks for Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) within the EU. The first strategy, Increasing the primary supply of the original material, for instance, by opening new European mining production or by-product extraction. The second strategy ensures access to resources from countries outside the European Union. The third strategy is reuse, recycling, and waste reduction. The fourth strategy, substitution, includes better material use. Sustainable primary production is a challenging goal because mining takes place in a highly competitive global market, often with insufficient environmental and social standards in many mining countries. Large volumes of secondary raw materials are not expected in the short term since many end-of-life products will only enter the recycling phase of their lifetimes after decades of use. For instance, a wind turbine reaches the end of its service life in 30 years. When recycling is not economically viable for many materials. Recycling is, therefore, an important long-term strategy. However, it is not an appropriate instrument to cope with potential short-and mid-term supply shortages. Substitution is, therefore, the defacto short-term strategy. Concerns about supply security, the consequences of supply restrictions, and the environmental impact of raw materials have led to numerous studies to evaluate the criticality of materials. Substitution or substitutability at the material level is often used as a sub-indicator for assessing criticality. At present, there are no comprehensive quantitative data on the substitutability of raw materials. This is because too many parameters can influence the degree to which a critical material is substituted. To be considered feasible in general, substitution should meet at least three main conditions. It should therefore align with performance requirements. It should make sense economically, meaning that the cost of the substitute material and of the manufacturing process should remain competitive. And it should be effectively scalable. In addition, the substitution should not lead to another pitfall. For instance, the solution is not to replace a critical raw material with another critical one, therefore raising supply constraints for other applications. The substitution potential of critical raw materials can be seen from many perspectives. In most cases, the direct replacement of a critical raw material by another, a more readily available and less critical one, while maintaining the product's original performance, would appear to be either inadequate or infeasible. The scope of the substitution concept, therefore, needs to be broadened to also include other aspects such as product design, process changes, higher material efficiency, and product replacement by new technologies. From a product perspective, lighting appliances are a good example of substitution. Indeed, this market has, over time, shifted from incandescent to fluorescent discharge, compact fluorescent, and linear fluorescent lamps. It is now moving towards LED technology. LEDs give better energy efficiency and a longer lifespan than fluorescent lamps while requiring much smaller quantities of rare earth phosphors. A further reduction or even complete elimination of rare earth and other critical raw materials in LED lighting is possible by making an additional leap from semiconductor LEDs towards OLED for Organic LED. Broad adoption of LED technology and the increase in demand for critical raw materials gallium and indium will motivate the industry to search for substitutes. Market implementation of gallium-based semiconductor material can be regarded as a successful substitution for germanium in lighting. The global transition towards energy-efficient LED lighting for general lighting purposes as well as backlighting in displays will reduce the demand for terbium in lighting applications. In parallel, LED technology needs significantly lower amounts of europium and yttrium compared to fluorescent technologies. Unlike fluorescent lighting, LED relies on high-performing semiconductor materials to create the electroluminescent lighting effect. Until now, there have been no effective substitutes for gallium and indium in semiconductors because other components do not meet the high performance of the actual systems. Germanium is no longer relevant for lighting applications as its substitution with gallium and indium in state-of-the-art LED is already too far advanced. In this context and based on several assumptions, a possible variation in demand for critical raw materials in lighting, as well as some display applications, has been estimated by the European Union. Terbium, Europium, and Yttrium are expected to diminish, while Gallium and Indium may become more critical. As we have seen, substitution is an excellent short-term strategy. However, it may not be an easy solution to realize.