CD Laboratory for Sustainable Product Management enabling a Circular Economy

The circular economy principle pursues the goal of ecological and social sustainability. This CD Laboratory will collect data on the entire life cycle of products and services and define corresponding basic principles.

The design of products and services that are geared towards ecological and social sustainability throughout their life cycle is known as the circular economy. This sustainable product management is characterised by a comprehensive life cycle approach that also includes the aspects of reuse and service life extension.

This CD Laboratory develops methods, tools and concepts that enable sustainable product management. The basis for this is the collection of data across the entire life cycle of a product. On the basis of this foundation, the further areas of application that can arise from quality-assured and life cycle-related sustainability data, for example in the areas of the Internet of Things, product labelling or internalisation of external costs, will be investigated. Furthermore, basic principles and requirements for a circular economy from a sustainability perspective will be identified and developed. The research work is divided into two main parts, namely the collection of sustainability-related data across the product life cycle and the use of this data for sustainable product management.

Data collection covers methods for the identification, quality assurance and interpretation of sustainability-related data. In the context of data utilisation, it is worked out how this quality-assured data can be used for sustainable product design, sustainable product evaluation or other new applications in the context of sustainable product management. An essential aspect of this is also to analyse the decision-making processes within and between companies that influence the successful design of sustainable product management and to incorporate the findings into the design and validation of sustainable product management.

The research work is expected to result in instruments, methods and concepts for collecting ecological and social data on products and services from the supply chains, the utilisation phase and the disposal phase or recycling, for the ecological and social evaluation and design of such products and services, and for using the collected data for other applications (e.g. reporting, compliance management).