Designing for a circular future
Circularity is about transforming the existing ‘take, make, waste’ linear model to the opposite – reuse, refurbish, remanufacture, and recycle. One key piece of the puzzle is to adopt circular thinking during the design phase of the product, developing it right from the beginning so it can reach its full circularity potential one day.
Enabling circular loops is how IKEA will transition towards a circular business, impacting all aspects of our business from how and where we meet our customers to how and what products and services we develop, how and what materials we source, and how we develop the IKEA supply chain.
The circular loops describe how we define reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling as a means to retain as much value as possible and extend the life of resources, products, parts and materials for our customers and IKEA.
Designing products with circular capabilities helps ensure they can move through the circular loops.
These are the circular loops we are working with:
Reuse
Once customers acquire a product, the product enters the first circular loop of reuse. Reuse is how we describe the customer use of the product and includes all aspects of everyday product use and care in the customer's home, such as maintaining, repairing or upgrading its condition and adapting it to the evolving needs of life. This also includes passing on of products and enabling secondhand markets.
Refurbishment
Refurbishment is the process by which used or damaged products are restored to ‘like-new’ condition with limited improvements by IKEA or a third party outside the customer's home. Through refurbishment products are evaluated, cleaned and/or repaired, can be upgraded, recertified, and eventually released back into the market.
Remanufacturing
Remanufacturing is the process by which usable parts from dismantled products are utilized in the production of new products.
Recycling
Recycling is the process by which parts from products are transformed into new raw material, which can then be utilized within IKEA or external supply chains. This is the last step for every product part. The pre-requisite for a product part to reach this stage in its life cycle is that all relevant possibilities to go through the reuse, refurbishment, and remanufacturing loops have been considered.
Circularity and Democratic Design
Democratic Design is at the heart of every IKEA product. It's our approach for designing, developing and evaluating IKEA products to ensure that they integrate good function, beautiful form and long-lasting quality, while also securing sustainability and low prices.
The sustainability dimension of Democratic Design focuses on how products are created within the boundaries of the planet in mind.
Circular design principles are one of several ingredients in the sustainability dimension of Democratic Design. They ensure that we design for the intended use of the product, while also planning for how the product lifespan can be extended.
Our circular product design principles
We use circular design principles to better understand and describe what aspects to consider to develop products with circular capabilities.
Not all products have the same possibilities for reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing or recycling. Thus, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ recipe for circular product design. The applicability of different circular design principles for a particular product is determined by the product type, expected lifespan and circular flows of the product, and the material mix.
It is the combination of different circular product design principles that together create a built-in possibility for all products to last as long as possible and eventually become a resource for new products.
The 8 circular design principles are:
- Design for renewable or recycled materials
- Design for standardisation
- Design for care
- Design for repair
- Design for adaptability
- Design for disassembly and reassembly
- Design for remanufacturing
- Design for recyclability