Is Prolonging the Lifetime of Passive Durable Products a Low-Hanging Fruit of a Circular Economy? A Multiple Case Study

Abstract

Extending the lifetime of passive products, i.e., products that do not consume materials or energy during the use phase, by implementing product-service systems (PSS) has a potential to reduce the environmental impact while being an attractive and straightforward measure for companies to implement. This research assesses the viability of introducing PSS for passive products, by documenting five real product cases of prolonging the lifetime through repair or refurbishment and by quantifying, through life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC), the change in environmental and economic outcome. The environmental impact (measured as global warming potential over the life cycle) was reduced for all cases because extraction and production dominated the impact. This reduction was 45–72% for most cases and mainly influenced by the number of reuses and the relative environmental burden of the components whose lifetime was prolonged. The costs for the company (measured as LCC from the manufacturer’s perspective) decreased too by 8–37%. The main reason that costs reduced less than the environmental impact is that some costs have no equivalent in LCA, e.g., administration and labor costs for services. The decreases in both LCA and LCC results, as well as the willingness of the companies to implement the changes, demonstrate that this measure can be financially attractive for companies to implement and effectively contribute to a circular economy.

A Multi-Criteria Evaluation Method of Product-Level Circularity Strategies

“…Secondary data collected from two companies is used to verify the application of the proposed method to evaluate alternative circularity strategies. More details about the case study companies can be found from Kaddoura, Kambanou, Tillman, and Sakao (2019) [81]. In the following sections, the application of the proposed method to each case company is presented.…”

“…Concerning the three criteria for assessing contributions towards a circular economy, i.e., environmental, economic, and social, there is a strong recommendation to use life cycle approaches because circularity strategies that influence one life cycle stage can shift burdens to other life cycle stages [77,80]. Therefore, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and LCC are recommended as the indicators for evaluating environmental and economic criteria respectively and care should be made when making methodological choices so that they can be used in parallel [81]. Since Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) is not robust and widely used [82], other types of qualitative indicators are recommended as sub-criteria or indicators for the criterion "social".…”

“…and market demand respectively. Additionally, a weighting value of 0.15, 0.20, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.20 (based on experience from previous study in [49] and [81]) is assigned respectively as shown in Table 4. Table 3.…”

Using life cycle costing (LCC) to select circular measures: A discussion and practical approach

“…This was confirmed by the case companies, who said that expert support is needed to conduct LCA as well as training to understand the concept. LCA, although beyond the scope of this article, was performed as part of the project to assess the environmental improvements of the circular offerings so this is the basis for the previous statement see Kaddoura, Kambanou, Tillman, and Sakao (2019). To compensate though for the limited environmental perspective, the underlying hierarchy of CE measures which has been created from the perspective of resource efficiency can be used.…”

Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation from an Array of Subsea Tidal Kite Prototypes

“…Since the GBF contributes significantly to GWP, a scenario was defined where the concrete GBF was re-used once (i.e., the GBF life-time was extended to 50 years) in another system, based on suggestions by Andersen, Eriksson, Hillman, and Wallhagen [32]. Given that GBF has passive, durable components, extending its lifetime will most likely contribute to environmental benefits with no trade-offs [35].…”