Users’ Contributions to Closing the Loop and Their Implications for Design

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to collect up-to-date research articles that explore consumer and user perspectives on circular design strategies for closing the loop. Many circular solutions depend on the ultimate user of those systems to accept alternative business models (other than outright ownership) and to perform certain actions essential to closing the loop and essential to keeping products in the inner loops. This includes the willingness to pay for access or pay per use, willingness to accept pre-used products, willingness to repair or have a product repaired, and willingness to separate waste.

Although the discourse regarding circular economy mainly focuses on the business and production aspects, the active participation of all actors of the system including users and consumers is crucial to facilitate a successful transition to a circular system. Hence, recent years have seen a growing number of scientific publications on, for example, the user perspectives (Wastling et al., 2018) as well as an increase of the calls for investigations into the implications of the circular economy for those on the side of consumption and use. Consumers’ involvement is crucial for the circular economy, for example, in order to enable the return of products for reuse, repair and remanufacturing, as well as the collection of waste for recycling (Ghisellini et al., 2016). Moreover, understanding consumers’ perspectives could have an impact on reducing resource consumption, increasing the repair, remanufacturing, and recycling rates and raising the innovation potential of products and services (Lofthouse and Prendeville, 2017). The importance of consumers and their perspectives for the circular economy raise interesting, new questions for research on sustainability:

• What kind of services and/or products were needed to increase the consumers’ engagement in the strategies of closing the loop?
• Under which conditions do consumers engage (more or less) with the strategies of closing the loop?
• How do customer perspectives differ across different types of circular design strategies?
• Under which circumstances is repair economically viable for consumers?
• What design strategies engage customers in relation to different types of circular business models?
• What are the implications for design of consumers’ contributions to closing the loop?
• What are the factors that affect consumers’ willingness to separate waste?
• What measures can be taken to increase consumers’ willingness to separate waste?
• How do consumers respond to the measures taken to increase their waste separation practices?
• What kind of services and/or products were needed to increase the consumers’ willingness to separate waste?

Ghisellini, P., Cialani, C., & Ulgiati, S. (2016). A review on circular economy: The expected transition to a balanced interplay of environmental and economic systems. Journal of Cleaner Production, 114, 11-32.

Lofthouse, V. A., & Prendeville, S. (2017). Considering the user in the circular economy in C. Bakker, R. Mugge (Eds.), Product Lifetimes and the Environment 2017 Conference Proceedings, IOS Press, Delft, The Netherlands (2017), pp. 213-216.

Wastling, T., Charnley, F., & Moreno, M. (2018). Design for circular behaviour: Considering users in a circular economy. Sustainability, 10(6), 1743.

Prof. Dr. Renee Wever
Dr. Nazli Terzioglu-Özkan
Dr. Bas Flipsen
Guest Editors

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• user perspectives
• consumer perspectives
• closing the loop
• repair
• waste separation willingness
• circular design
• circular economy
• sustainability
• sustainable consumption