Design for Sustainability and Circular Economy
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Resources and Sustainable Utilization".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 September 2022) | Viewed by 4120
Special Issue Editors
Interests: engineering design; engineering supply chains; design informatics
Interests: modelling; simulation; sustainable manufacturing; productivity; supply chains
Interests: digital manufacturing; digitisation of skill-intensive manufacturing processes; autonomous manufacturing; multi-level optimisation; simulation; manufacturing informatics; machine learning; sensing and IoT
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Through its sustainable development goals, the United Nations provides aspirations for sustainable futures including those related to climate change and environmental degradation. Design activities, including but not limited to product design, digital design, design of production systems and supply chains for product realisation and through life support, design of service systems to deploy products, and design for the re-use of the resources at the end of product life, have a significant impact on both climate change and environmental degradation. Circular economy initiatives, where economic, environmental and social imperatives drive moves from linear (take-use-dispose) to circular (take-use-reuse) product lifecycles, are an important milestone on the journey to a sustainable future for the planet. However, they are insufficient because the implementation of circularity still results in environmental degradation such as emissions and depletion of resources, and contributes to climate change.
The extent to which a given product or service can be circularised or produced, used and operated sustainably is often determined very early in the design process, when design requirements are agreed, solution principles fixed, and materials and manufacturing processes selected. The goal of this Special Issue is to bring together research and current thinking on how design and design thinking might be used to realise circularity and sustainability. Consideration of how products and materials will be recovered over time must account for factors including the likely ease of recovery, volume, and quality, as well as infrastructures and the motivation of users to support this. With this in mind, we invite papers that address one or more of the following topics:
- The impact of design and design decisions on the sustainability of production, operations, and use lifecycles (including green behaviours of people and organisations).
- Sustainable circularity and design for end of life.
- Opportunities for technological innovations.
- Impacts of regulations and policy.
- Consumer and organisational behaviour change to prolong use.
- Digital technologies to support circularity and sustainability, e.g., to support longevity or to avoid disposal at end of life.
- How new design practice accounts for legacy products and systems and whether new unsustainable lock-ins are created.
- How the efficacy of design for whole life can be measured and likely outcomes assessed to understand the potential tradeoffs in circular solutions.
Prof. Alison McKay
Prof. Peter Ball
Prof. Ashutosh Tiwari
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- sustainable design
- green design
- eco-design
- circular economy
- design decision-making
