| Objectives |
The Circular Economy (CE) is a new vision covering the multiple levels of economies, organizations and individuals (as well as the societies they are embedded in) by addressing several of today's challenges. Such challenges include resource scarceness (e.g. critical materials), environmental pollution and degradation (e.g. climate change, loss of biodiversity, unhealthy products) and the increasing dependency on ever increasing production quantities (and related resource usage) for safeguarding (national) employment levels. The CE proposes a value creation architecture based on material flows circulating either in biological cycles (e.g. biodegradable products) or technical cycles (e.g. reuse, refurbishing, repairing, recycling of products and materials) ultimately aiming at higher resource efficiency, decreased dependency on external inputs and significant increase of regional job opportunities in the service sector (e.g. repair, refurbishing). Furthermore, product sharing (e.g. carsharing) is considered an additional strategy for using existing resources more intensively.
Against this background, this seminar will look at the implications of the CE for product and service development strategies (e.g. design-for-circularity, product take-back strategies), quality design and management (e.g. quality criteria for cycled materials and products) and firm's business models (e.g. transformation from product sales to product-service-systems approach).
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