Environmental evaluation of carpet designs in a circular economy

When designing a product, many decisions are made that determine the environmental impacts the product will eventually exert on our Planet. Indeed, prioritising a material over others, determining how much of this material will be in the finished product and how all the product-components are linked or blended together, are all choices that influence the sustainability of a design. Therefore, it is important to consider the environmental performance already in the design phase. In this thesis, I will showcase the application of the recently developed Resource Pressure (RP) method (Desing et al., 2021) to assess the environmental sustainability of different carpet designs and circular strategies. This method consists of both qualitative guidelines and a quantitative indicator, evaluating the product system concerning the consumption of primary resources and generation of final waste with the Earth's carrying capacity as reference. By following the design guidelines provided by the method, several scenarios are developed with the aim of identifying the most promising changes in design and circular strategies for improving the environmental performance of the product. To evaluate the RP method, the results are compared to a simplified LCA study for twelve of the carpet design scenarios. Comparing RP method to LCA results, a close correlation was observed for most of the impact categories considered. This confirms that the RP method can effectively predict environmental impacts across a wide range of impact categories, without the need for detailed process data and specific LCA knowledge. It can therefore support designers to easily consider the environmental effects themselves and throughout the design process. Moreover, the simplicity of this method makes it attractive to use for a wider group of practitioners.