But a new systematic review of the scientific literature suggests that the digital tools designed to make manufacturing circular are themselves stuck in a linear mindset. The study, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Themiya S. Kuruppuge and colleagues at the University of Exeter’s Exeter Digital Enterprise Lab, analysed 231 papers drawn from an initial pool of 614 documents indexed in the Scopus database between 2000 and 2025. Using bibliometric mapping with VOSviewer and Biblioshiny alongside qualitative content analysis, the team set out to answer five questions about how decision support systems, or DSS, are being used to embed circular economy principles across manufacturing, from the drawing board to the reverse logistics network.

The headline finding is stark fragmentation. Only 5 percent of the reviewed studies integrated decisions across all three levels of the manufacturing operation simultaneously: the product level, where designers specify materials, geometries and functional requirements; the process level, where engineers control energy use, waste and emissions along the production line; and the system level, where supply chain managers design forward and reverse logistics networks, choose facility locations and coordinate suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers. More than half of the studies, 61 percent, addressed just a single level, with 46 percent focused on product-level questions such as material selection and design for disassembly, and 39 percent on system-level network design. The remaining third of the frameworks linked two levels, but full integration remains vanishingly rare.

The review also uncovered a powerful temporal bias. Forty-five percent of the decision support frameworks concentrated on end-of-life decisions, such as recovery strategy selection, disassembly planning and recycling process optimisation, while only 8 percent addressed the manufacturing phase. This end-of-life dominance reflects the field’s roots in waste management and recycling, and the immediate regulatory pressures manufacturers face to collect and process returned products. Yet the review points to a critical mismatch: studies cited in the paper suggest that around 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact and circularity potential is fixed during the initial design stage, precisely when designers have the least access to lifecycle information. Products designed without consideration of recovery requirements arrive at processing facilities constrained by upstream decisions, limiting the achievable level of circularity no matter how sophisticated the recycling operations downstream may be.

The authors frame this as an information-decision timing mismatch, and it is arguably the central technical challenge of the field. Designers make material selections and architectural choices during conceptual phases with sparse lifecycle data, while the information needed to evaluate those choices only becomes available after products have been produced, distributed, used and recovered. Traditional life cycle assessment, the workhorse method for quantifying environmental impacts across a product’s lifespan, is frequently deployed to measure the impacts of finalised designs rather than to optimise them early on. Limited information and high uncertainty during early design phases hinder the use of LCA exactly where it would deliver the greatest leverage, and many of the frameworks in the literature remain conceptual, struggling to reach industrial practice because of data unavailability, complexity and high collection costs.

On the assessment side, the review found that environmental and economic tools dominate. Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing frequently appear together, quantifying ecological performance and tracking costs across lifecycles, which matters particularly for remanufacturing and product-service systems where upfront investments differ from traditional manufacturing but generate returns over extended periods. Techno-economic analysis extends this by testing whether recovery technologies can meet technical specifications while remaining economically competitive. Material Flow Analysis identifies where materials accumulate, leak from circular loops or get downcycled into lower-value applications, while circularity metrics such as the Material Circularity Indicator quantify the proportion of materials from recycled or reused sources flowing into future use cycles. Mathematical optimisation models, including linear and mixed-integer programming and multi-objective optimisation, are then used to identify optimal solutions from within these frameworks.

Digitalisation is the fastest-moving frontier. The bibliometric analysis revealed three distinct evolutionary phases: early research from 2000 to 2018 concentrated on closed-loop supply chains, reverse logistics and product recovery; a middle phase shifted attention to assessment methodologies and eco-design approaches such as design for recycling and design for disassembly; and the most recent phase, from 2023 to 2025, is defined by digital technologies, Industry 4.0 and digitalisation. The tools now on the table include Internet of Things sensors that generate data on actual use patterns and remaining useful life, digital twins that simulate lifecycle performance before physical products exist, machine learning models that predict future return characteristics, and blockchain systems that maintain product history across ownership transfers. These technologies do not eliminate the timing mismatch, but they accelerate information availability and allow decisions to adapt as product conditions change, providing the connectivity, traceability and data transparency that circular operations demand.

Yet the review is clear that technology alone will not close the gaps. Information must reach decision-makers in forms they can actually apply: manufacturing engineers need process specifications rather than raw LCA data, and supply chain planners need return volume projections formatted for logistics optimisation tools. There is also a striking blind spot around business model innovation. The circular economy fundamentally requires new ways of creating value, such as product-as-a-service, leasing, pay-per-use and sharing schemes, which change the decisions that must be made and the information needed to support them. When manufacturers retain ownership of their products, they gain direct incentives to design for durability, repairability and multiple use cycles, aligning business interests with circular principles. But these models introduce complex pricing questions, capacity planning that must balance new production with refurbishment, and new stakeholders including third-party service providers, financing institutions and insurers. Recent industry surveys cited in the paper report that more than 70 percent of manufacturing leaders expect circular business solutions to raise revenue by 2027, and 65 percent believe such solutions will enhance operational resilience.

The geography of the research field is itself uneven. Some 56 percent of the reviewed papers originate from European countries, a pattern the authors attribute to strong policy frameworks including the EU Circular Economy Action Plan of 2015 and its 2020 update under the European Green Deal, which mandate circularity considerations in product design, production and waste management and introduced instruments such as digital product passports and right-to-repair provisions. Less than 5 percent of studies came from South America, Africa and Oceania, suggesting that much of the global manufacturing base is developing circular decision support outside the mainstream research conversation. The authors acknowledge their own limitations as well: the review drew only on Scopus, included only English-language documents, and excluded the construction sector, so regional innovations and non-English literature may be underrepresented.

The way forward, the authors argue, is an integrated decision support system that converges system-level thinking with a circular economy framework and digital capabilities, creating an early-stage tool that provides feedback during design phases rather than after the fact. In their proposed vision, product, process and supply chain decisions operate within a shared design space, influencing one another rather than functioning in isolation, with digitalisation as the enabling layer that makes cross-level, early-stage support practically achievable. The deeper message is a reframing of sustainability itself: not as a constraint checked after designs are finished, but as a design goal optimised alongside functionality, cost and quality. Achieving that will require interdisciplinary collaboration across engineering, operations and business strategy, and a willingness to treat the circular economy not as an end-of-pipe fix but as the organising principle of how products are conceived in the first place.

Subject of Research: Decision support systems for circular economy implementation in manufacturing supply chains

Article Title: Decision support systems to facilitate circular economy at the supply chain level: a systematic literature review

Article References: Kuruppuge, T. S., Kulatunga, A. K., Luis, M., & Sucala, V. I. (2026). Decision support systems to facilitate circular economy at the supply chain level: a systematic literature review. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2141-2157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00145-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00145-6

Keywords: circular economy, decision support systems, sustainable manufacturing, supply chain management, life cycle assessment, Industry 4.0, digital twins, reverse logistics, eco-design, business model innovation, systematic literature review, industrial ecology

The Digital Health in the Circular Economy, or DiCE, project, funded through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme and coordinated with the involvement of the Brussels-based WEEE Forum, brought together twenty participating organisations from nine European countries. Its final report concludes that manufacturers, healthcare providers, policymakers, recyclers and patients all have essential roles to play in reducing healthcare electronic waste while maintaining the highest standards of patient safety. Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, framed the stakes bluntly: digital health technologies are transforming medicine, with millions of devices helping patients live longer, healthier lives while making care more personalised and efficient, but the rapid growth of this market is creating a largely overlooked problem in the form of a fast-growing stream of electronic waste. The project, he said, has shown how to mitigate that problem and recover increasingly precious and strategically critical raw materials.

The scale of the challenge is difficult to pin down precisely, because no comprehensive global estimate of medical electronic waste yet exists. What evidence is available, however, points in one direction. Research indicates that some 83 million wearable medical devices were placed on the European market in 2020 alone, and that globally the figure could approach two billion devices annually by 2050 if current trends continue. That growth sits against a broader backdrop in which electronic waste of all kinds already exceeds 62 million tonnes worldwide every year, according to the United Nations, and is projected to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030. In Europe, only about 54 percent of electronic waste is properly collected, meaning a substantial share of embedded materials simply disappears into landfill or incineration streams.

At the heart of the DiCE report is a set of five priorities for redesigning the healthcare ecosystem. The project recommends that repairability, refurbishment and remanufacturing potential be considered when medical devices are first designed, so that service lives can be extended rather than cut short. It calls for digital product passports and detailed bills of materials to improve the recovery of valuable components and critical raw materials, for the expansion of convenient collection and return systems through pharmacies and other trusted locations, and for better alignment of medical device regulations with sustainable product design rules so that environmental goals complement rather than conflict with patient safety requirements. Finally, it urges the development of new circularity indicators that reward lifetime extension, reuse and repair rather than recycling alone. The report concludes that extending product lifetimes delivers substantially greater environmental benefits than concentrating on end-of-life recycling.

Everything, the researchers argue, starts with design. According to the European Commission, roughly 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage, and DiCE translated that insight into a five-step Circular Design Guide built on four design case studies developed with clinicians, engineers and users. The guide integrates circular thinking into existing digital health development processes rather than replacing them or asking teams to start from scratch. Across the case studies, cleanability, disassembly, component lifetimes, clinical workflows and traceability all proved essential considerations. Tamara Hoveling of TU Delft, the lead author of the guide, noted that the healthcare sector increasingly depends on digital technologies yet many devices are designed to be used and discarded, and that the central challenge was to preserve clinical performance and patient safety while extending product life, recovering valuable materials and reducing environmental impacts.

Some of the project’s most striking findings came from a series of detailed Life Cycle Assessments examining representative digital healthcare products. Researchers found that electronic components such as printed circuit boards, batteries and displays dominate the environmental footprint of individual devices. But the studies also revealed something unexpected: redesigning healthcare systems often produces greater environmental gains than redesigning the devices themselves. Reusable electrocardiogram lead sets reduced environmental impacts by 81 to 94 percent compared with disposable alternatives, although once reuse systems were introduced, cleaning and sterilisation became the primary environmental hotspot. Electronic pharmaceutical labels reduced climate impacts associated with drug manufacturing by approximately 27 percent, because medicines could remain usable when label information changed instead of entire batches being discarded. Powered electronic surgical staplers cut the overall climate impact of surgery by about 12 percent, as shorter procedures and hospital stays more than offset the additional electronics. Smart pillboxes, meanwhile, represented only a tiny fraction of the overall footprint of a patient’s treatment pathway, demonstrating that system design frequently matters far more than the device itself.

The project also moved beyond modelling into real-world testing. Consumer pilots involving 414 participants in Belgium, Spain and Slovenia found that more than 60 percent of participants were willing to return unwanted healthcare devices when convenient collection systems were available. DiCE deployed 25 easily accessible pilot collection machines in pharmacies, public buildings, supermarkets and care facilities across the three countries. The smart, secure system works by having users scan a QR code that unlocks a collection hatch; each returned device is captured by an interior camera, identified through an image recognition system and registered, creating a traceable record. The project also evaluated reverse logistics solutions including dedicated GRIN collection boxes, which are smart automated return-collection machines, alongside pharmacy-based and postal return systems, demonstrating that convenient collection infrastructure is essential for recovering valuable products and materials.

Industry voices within the consortium emphasised that the transformation is as much a business challenge as a technical one. Caroline Allard, Senior Sustainability Manager at Philips, observed that digital technologies are redefining healthcare through connected devices, artificial intelligence and data-driven care, yet this transformation also increases demand for materials, energy and resources. The challenge for manufacturers, she said, is to decouple better health outcomes from greater environmental impact by designing products, services and business models that keep materials in use for longer and minimise waste. The report’s technical analysis supports that ambition: redesigned powered surgical staplers achieved a potential material recovery rate of 90 percent, compared with 51 percent for devices on the market today, illustrating how much value current design practices leave on the table.

Perhaps the most striking message from the final report is one of optimism. Unlike many environmental problems, the researchers argue, this is one of the few for which the practical tools already exist: better design, repair, refurbishment, accessible collection systems, high-quality recycling and clearer regulatory alignment. Many patients want to dispose of devices responsibly but simply do not know where to return them or whether they can be reused, and better collection systems make doing the right thing far easier. The project has also produced a Circularity Dashboard, a policy-support tool available at circulardigitalhealth.eu that turns complex system data into accessible insight, allowing policymakers to compare circularity, cost and environmental performance across what-if scenarios, along with practical training materials to help manufacturers, healthcare providers and policymakers adopt circular approaches.

Launched in October 2022 and running until September 2026, DiCE set out to shift digital healthcare from a linear take-make-waste model to a circular one that maximises the recovery of products, components and valuable raw materials, deliberately basing its decisions and strategies on real-life pilots and community-engaged experiments in healthcare systems across Belgium, Slovenia and Spain. The project also employed motivational strategies drawn from behavioural science to encourage sustainable behaviour among patients and clinicians. Its final conclusion is that a more circular healthcare system is achievable if manufacturers, healthcare providers, governments and patients work together, and that future systems should be designed to keep products and materials in circulation for as long as possible through better design, repair, refurbishment, reuse and, ultimately, high-quality recycling. For a sector whose digital transformation is accelerating at nearly 20 percent annually, the blueprint arrives at a moment when the alternative, a rising tide of incinerated electronics carrying critical raw materials, is becoming impossible to ignore.

Subject of Research: Circular economy strategies for reducing electronic waste from digital healthcare devices

Article Title: Digital healthcare and electronic waste: There is a solution, EU experts say

Article References: Digital healthcare and electronic waste: There is a solution, EU experts say. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: electronic waste, digital health, circular economy, medical devices, recycling, Horizon Europe, life cycle assessment, eco-design, critical raw materials, WEEE Forum, patient safety, reuse

The problem the researchers set out to solve is one that lurks inside nearly every eco-design effort. When a manufacturer wants to extend a product’s useful life, the temptation is to modify the part most responsible for wear and tear, and to consider that part in isolation. But products are not collections of independent components; they are webs of coupled functional chains in which one part’s behavior constrains another’s. The study shows that many lifespan-extension practices overlook this interdependence, along with the environmental impacts that design changes themselves introduce. The result is that engineers often cannot identify which parts are truly critical to both longevity and environmental performance, and cannot guarantee that a longer-lived product actually delivers net sustainability benefits rather than simply shifting burdens elsewhere in the life cycle.

To close this gap, the team built a framework that links part-level design changes directly to three outcomes: lifespan, environmental impact, and cost. The approach begins by mapping how components depend on one another functionally, borrowing concepts from design structure matrix methods that have long been used in systems engineering to untangle complex products. Reliability engineering then enters the picture through Weibull-based lifetime modeling, a statistical approach widely used to predict how long a component will survive under given operating conditions. By combining coupling analysis with lifetime modeling, the framework can identify which components must be redesigned together, and how changes to one ripple through the durability of the whole.

The air circuit breaker served as a rigorous test bed. These devices protect electrical circuits in industrial settings, and their lifespan is typically measured not in years of service but in switching cycles, the number of times they can open and close safely. Two components emerged as central: the contact tip, which endures the physical stress of each switching operation, and the rear connection, which anchors the assembly and is vulnerable to the mechanical and thermal conditions created by the moving contact. The analysis found that these two parts are strongly coupled. In practical terms, any effort to thicken or toughen the contact tip must be coordinated with the choice of materials for the rear connection, because the two components interact in ways that jointly determine whether the breaker meets its lifespan target and its environmental requirements.

The team then applied the framework to a concrete design target: a breaker capable of enduring 6,000 switching cycles at 90 percent reliability. Using their coupled analysis, they identified a feasible design space before any optimization took place: a contact tip thickness range of roughly 2.0 to 2.5 millimeters. This step matters because it treats lifespan as a prior constraint rather than as one objective to be traded away later. Within that lifespan-secured space, the remaining decision was which material to use for the rear connection, and here the framework exposed a genuine trade-off between carbon and cost. Choosing copper delivered the larger environmental payoff, cutting the carbon emissions associated with the equipment by 34 to 36 percent, while recycled aluminum limited any increase in production cost to less than 2 percent but offered a smaller carbon benefit. Neither choice dominates; the framework’s contribution is making the trade-off visible and quantifiable at the design stage, when decisions are still cheap to change.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns reliability itself. Designers often assume that demanding higher reliability is unambiguously good, since it means fewer failures in the field. But the study shows that reliability requirements and product lifespan interact in complex ways. When the researchers raised the reliability level from 78 to 90 percent, the projected lifespan fell by 15 percent while carbon emissions rose by 1.9 percent. The mechanism is subtle: requiring a component to survive under stricter statistical guarantees changes the way lifetime must be modeled and can push designs toward configurations that are, in aggregate, shorter-lived and more emissions-intensive. The implication is that environmental impact assessments of electronic equipment cannot treat lifespan as a fixed number; they must always state the reliability level that lifespan corresponds to, otherwise comparisons between designs are meaningless.

These results arrive at a moment when the policy landscape is shifting rapidly. The European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which entered into force in 2024, pushes manufacturers to design for durability, repairability, and circularity, while international standards such as IEC 62271 for switchgear and NF EN 45552 for assessing durability of energy-related products increasingly require quantitative methods for product longevity. Meanwhile, the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 documented that only a fraction of the world’s discarded electronics is formally collected and recycled, leaving vast quantities of embodied materials and emissions to leak into landfills and informal waste streams. Tools that let designers see, early on, how lifespan, emissions, and cost interact could therefore shape products far more effectively than end-of-pipe recycling alone.

The study distills its findings into three guiding principles. First, eco-design should evaluate coupled functional chains rather than isolated parts, because the components that govern longevity frequently interact and cannot be optimized one at a time. Second, lifespan should be established as a prior design constraint before multi-objective optimization begins; if durability is merely one objective among many, optimization algorithms may sacrifice it in favor of cost or weight, quietly undermining the circularity goal. Third, environmental impact assessment should consider product lifespan together with the reliability level at which that lifespan is defined, ensuring that reported lifetimes are statistically meaningful and comparable across designs. Taken together, these principles shift eco-design from a part-by-part checklist exercise toward a systems view of product sustainability.

The framework’s significance extends beyond circuit breakers. Electrical and electronic equipment spans everything from consumer devices to grid infrastructure, and the authors’ earlier work, including a knowledge-graph-based method for green design evaluation of such equipment published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering in 2023, has been building toward exactly this kind of integrated, quantitative approach. The new study, funded by the Fujian Provincial Science and Technology Department, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, demonstrates the method on real industrial data provided by a partner company under confidentiality, lending it practical credibility. As regulators tighten durability requirements and manufacturers confront both climate targets and cost pressures, the message of this research is likely to resonate: the greenest product is not simply the one built with the cleanest material or the thickest part, but the one whose designers understood how every component’s fate is bound to every other’s, and who defined, from the start, how long the product should last and with what statistical confidence.

Subject of Research: Eco-design and environmental impact assessment of electrical and electronic equipment incorporating product lifespan and component interdependencies

Article Title: Incorporating product lifespan into eco-design and environmental impact assessment of electrical and electronic equipment

Article References: Liu, G.-G., Wang, Q.-C., Fan, L., Wang, J.-Y., & Chen, W.-Q. (2026). Incorporating product lifespan into eco-design and environmental impact assessment of electrical and electronic equipment. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00181-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00181-2

Keywords: eco-design, electronic waste, product lifespan, life cycle assessment, reliability engineering, Weibull model, air circuit breaker, circular economy, carbon emissions, multi-objective optimization, electrical equipment, sustainability