Material transparency: The missing link for scaling circularity

Growing interest in circularity by product designers has big potential for helping companies achieve sustainability goals. Yet many organizations think of material transparency as a parallel goal rather than an integral part of circularity.

It is much easier and more glamorous to make bold claims about circularity — how a company will repurpose all its scrap materials, or how it will launch a new takeback program. Many of these statements lack details about the how — how will the take-back program work? How is a company prioritizing maintenance, repair and redistribution in its supply chain and business model? Often, this is because many of these steps are far into the future.

That’s why material transparency — which is determined in product design — often is left out of the conversation. One of the best ways to future-proof circularity efforts is to engage in rigorous materials transparency efforts during design so that future recycling efforts have the best chance to work with products that are taken back.