Designing for circularity

Businesses collectively spend BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to optimize the design, production, and distribution of the goods they produce, yet it seems as though there’s zero thought given to the deconstruction of those products and reallocation of their components at their end of life. Instead, the burden is on us, the consumers, to figure out wtf to do with these products that once served us but now no longer meet our needs.

If we, as a species, are able to design optimal production and distribution processes for material goods, logic would follow that we should also be able to design the deconstruction and end-of-life processes for a product’s lifecycle as well.

But why aren’t we able to get rid of a product as easy as we are able to purchase and use one? Where’s all the investment in the latter half of a product’s lifecycle?

It’s missing, because there’s no way to hold producers responsible for the goods—e.g. waste—their businesses are built upon producing.

Which is why we need [[EPR]].