Circular Economy, Eco-design and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment
What this domain tests
This domain tests whether you can connect circular strategies and eco-design to quantified life-cycle evidence, and whether you can structure a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment without collapsing environmental, economic, and social dimensions into an unjustified single score.
Core rules and concepts
- Circular economy strategies include refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, remanufacture, and recycle. The waste hierarchy is a guide, not a substitute for LCA: a strategy can shift burdens between phases.
- Eco-design integrates environmental aspects at the design stage; ISO 14006 provides guidance on eco-design within environmental management.
- Circularity indicators, such as material circularity metrics, describe material flows, not environmental impacts.
- LCSA combines LCA, life cycle costing, and social LCA. The three pillars may use different functional units, boundaries, and stakeholder perspectives.
- Trade-offs should be shown explicitly; weighting across pillars is value-based.
Worked example
A smartphone is redesigned for repairability. The new case is heavier and uses a more energy-intensive alloy, but the screen and battery can be replaced. LCA shows manufacturing dominates, so extending lifetime from three to five years lowers annual burdens despite the heavier case. Life cycle costing shows higher upfront cost but lower replacement cost. Social LCA flags supplier labour risks for the new alloy. The conclusion is conditional: repair is preferable only if consumers actually repair and spare parts are available.
Traps that cost marks
- Assuming recycling is always beneficial and infinite.
- Using a circularity score as a proxy for environmental impact.
- Summing environmental, cost, and social results without transparent weighting.
- Ignoring behaviour, infrastructure, and spare-parts availability in lifetime extension.
- Applying one pillar's boundary uncritically to all three.