Proposition of a Framework for Measuring Meso-Level Product-Oriented Circularity : Case Study of the Swedish Automotive Industry

Abstract: Circularity is a trending topic in research and in marketing documents from companies, as this notion is essential to move towards sustainability. However, there is no tool assessing the circularity of a manufactured product at a meso-level, i.e. on the product’s perspective, even though the same kind of tools exists for environmental impact. Such a tool could be very relevant to use at different stages of product development or even to harmonize the circularity indicators used by stakeholders at different levels, who are currently communicating using different metrics. To fill this research gap, a framework is proposed to measure circularity of Swedish automotive products, as road transportation is one of the sectors with the highest environmental impacts in Europe. Three indicators have been proposed to monitor circularity around industrial waste, energy use and electronic materials waste, building the foundations for a circularity monitoring framework. These three indicators are combining measurements and strategies from scientific literature as well as good practices from Swedish automotive industries. The indicators have been tested using representative data from online sources and assumed datapoints, the results of these simulations have been assessed by experts from the industry. They confirmed that such a tool would be relevant as it shows areas of improvement to increase the circularity of a product. Using only data available online and the framework developed, the industrial waste indicator of a representative product from the Swedish automotive industry has been calculated to be 38% with an accuracy of 66%, showing the ease of use of the tool developed. Energy and electronic waste indicators have been calculated to be 7.7% and 24% respectively for the case studied. Results shows that value of indicators tend to decrease with the accuracy increasing, which highlights the importance of an accuracy measurement associated with it. More aspects could be added to the existing framework to have a complete picture of the circularity of a product, as the tool is flexible and adaptable, but results shows that it is already possible to use it in its current state of development and could help companies when making decisions about circularity.