This paper focuses on how the Internet of Things (IoT) could contribute to the transition to a circular economy (CE), through supporting circular business model and design strategies. While literature has highlighted the opportunities for IoT to support circular strategies in business, little has been published about actual implementations in practice. The aim of this study was therefore to understand how companies to date have implemented IoT for circular strategies, and how these implementations compare to the range of opportunities described in literature. To that end, a two-step approach was followed. Firstly, building on academic literature, a framework was developed which categorizes different IoT-enabled circular strategies. The framework recognizes tracking, monitoring, control, optimization, and design evolution as IoT capabilities. Efficiency in use, increased utilization, and product lifetime extension are distinguished as circular in-use strategies, while reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling are distinguished as circular looping strategies. The framework complements previously published work, as it adds additional detail to the categorization, and allows for easy mapping of diverse cases. Secondly, 40 cases from practice were analyzed and mapped to the framework. This way, practice-based insights were derived about the current distribution of IoT-enabled circular strategies implemented in practice. The results show that current implementation of IoT-enabled circular strategies mainly supports two strategies in the use phase: efficiency in use and product lifetime extension. Only a small number of the reviewed cases display IoT-enabled looping (reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling). Similarly, few cases describe ‘design evolution’ for CE, i.e., the feedback of data from products in use to support circular design. Based on these results, this study identifies the need for future research to further investigate why IoT-enabled looping strategies and design evolution for circular strategies have not been implemented to scale.

The idea of leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) to support strategies in line with the circular economy (CE) has been gaining traction in literature. However, previous work has predominantly focused on the opportunities that these technologies can bring, and few studies have critically assessed the environmental viability of the proposed strategies. In this study, we assess the net environmental impact of IoT-enabled circular strategies in the specific case of truck tires in the Swedish context, in order to gain insight into when and how it makes environmental sense to embed IoT hardware into products to support circular strategies. We quantify (1) the potential environmental savings in the different life cycle phases made possible through access to sensor data, and (2) the environmental impact from the added technology needed to provide and process the data. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the difference in impact between the current state and an ‘IoT scenario’. We find that the IoT scenario gives a 4% lower weighted life cycle impact than the current state. Through sensitivity analysis, we show that the conclusions are sensitive to assumptions made about the expected benefits of adding IoT, which depend on the technological context as well as the current and IoT-induced behavior of stakeholders along the product life cycle. The results are also sensitive to assumptions about the environmental impact of the IoT hardware components, implying that design decisions at this level can be important for ensuring a net environmental impact reduction from IoT-enabled circular strategies.

Non-professional repairs could contribute to an increase in repairs, supporting circular economy goals, yet they raise safety concerns. While recent regulatory actions promote repair, they focus mainly on advancing access to professional repair, rather than enabling repairs by non-professionals, such as consumers and volunteers. This study investigates how product design can mitigate repair safety risks and contribute to safe non-professional repairs. In this exploratory research, a washing machine and a washer-dryer combo were analyzed through repeated disassembly and reassembly to identify mechanical, electrical, thermal, and chemical risks occurring during and after repair, as well as risk-inducing and risk-preventing design features and product architecture. Identified risk-inducing features include exposed components, vulnerable electrical and water connections, lack of reassembly guidance, and differences between disassembly and reassembly sequences. Based on the analysis insights, we developed a first version of a method for identifying, assessing, and mitigating repair safety risks. The method provides elements to visualize repair safety risks as an additional layer on disassembly maps and preliminary design recommendations to mitigate risk. The repair-risk mapping method aims to support designers in analyzing and anticipating repair safety risks and identifying relevant risk-inducing design features. Our findings show that relatively small design interventions, such as visual guidance, reusable connectors, robust connections, and enforced disassembly and reassembly sequences, can reduce risks and make repairs more accessible to non-professionals. Our research suggests that product design plays a crucial role in expanding repair opportunities to a broader range of users while maintaining safety.