Wood is an increasingly demanded renewable resource and an important raw material for construction and materials. Demands are rising, with a growing attention for re-use and upcycling, opening up opportunities for new business models, empowered by the use of digital design and technologies. A KPI framework …

Across cities and urban regions in The Netherlands unusual collaborations emerge which aim to develop new circular business models that facilitate product and resource longevity through various upcycling strategies, such as reuse, repair, refurbish, repurpose and/or remanufacture. Municipalities, social …

Repurpose is becoming more popular as a circularity strategy. This circularity strategy is specifically promising in the case of furniture. One of the challenges of upscaling repurpose is the negative consumer perception of repurposed products. Studies up to date pertain to consumer perception of refurbished …

The circular economy (CE) is heralded as reducing material use and emissions while providing more jobs and growth. We explored this narrative in a series of expert workshops, basing ourselves on theories, methods and findings from science fields such as global environmental input-output analysis, business …

Upcycling has been embraced by circular economy enthusiasts, policy-makers and collaborative initiatives across Europe. Early studies describe upcycling as a concept aimed at resource conservation by keeping products, components and materials at their highest potential value across consecutive product …

Making food packaging more sustainable is a complex process. Research has shown that specific knowledge is needed to support packaging developers to holistically improve the sustainability of packaging. Within this study we aim to provide insights in the various tradeoffs designers face with the aim …

circular economy as a system change is gaining more attention, reusing materials and products is part of this, but an effective method for repurposing seems to be missing. Repurpose is a strategy which uses a discarded product or its parts in a new product with a different function. Literature on specific …

The Dutch government and leading academics in the field of circular economy propose that “repurposing”, i.e., finding new usages for discarded material, is important to reduce resource usage. Waste collectors, municipalities and start-ups increasingly find ways to develop circular business models, aiming …

Scholars in sustainable consumption increasingly highlight the limitations of “weak sustainable consumption” approaches to overcome the challenges of the current environmental crisis. While efforts to enable cleaner production and circular flows of materials are necessary and important, progress in environmental …

The article highlights the limitations of speed as a framework for discussing and tackling the environmental challenges of growing clothing volumes or quantities. This argument builds on a series of wardrobe studies mapping the number of clothing items owned, purchased, and disposed of by 25 people during …