New standards focus on the product design process and its relationship to that product’s environmental impact.
By Jack Maxwell
Jun 30, 2025
The basic principles of circular design are not new to the 21st century: to create products that are durable, reusable, and capable of being repaired when they break and recycled when they can no longer be repaired. Long before there were multiple versions of every imaginable product for every conceivable end-use and it became easier to just throw away a gently used item and buy a new one, people made the most of their possessions.
Our resourceful predecessors fashioned items like furniture, household necessities, and clothing from the raw materials at hand. They repaired them when they broke and reused the constituent parts after they stopped working. The concept of sustainability, though not always known by that name, dates back millennia.
Discarded iron tools and weapons were melted down and turned into new implements in ancient Rome. In 17th century Japan, old manuscripts were soaked, pounded, and re-formed into new sheets of paper. Old clothes, often made by hand from wool and linen by early American settlers, became swatches for quilts when they finally wore out.
Ironically, it could be argued that the very super-abundance of stuff generated by the ever-expanding global economy created the conditions necessary for the growth of the circular design movement in recent decades. Government agencies implemented recycling programs, industry groups sought ways to mitigate their resource extraction and energy usage impacts, and individuals became more aware of the role they played in the endless make/use/dispose cycle of modern consumer culture.
ASTM International’s committee on sustainability (E60) has contributed to this important societal shift since its formation in 2008. And three new standards will extend that impact, one that focuses on the product design process itself and two others specifically designed to help stakeholders apply circular design concepts to the building product and healthcare industries.
Circularity in Product Design
Along the new product development continuum that stretches from that first spark of an idea to seeing the end result on a shelf at the local store, the early stages of the design process are the optimum point at which to make decisions that will impact that item’s sustainability.
“Circularity in manufactured products requires planning ahead in terms of the products, business models, supply chains, manufacturing processes, and the broader infrastructure,” explains Buddhika Hapuwatte, Ph.D., an associate at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and a member of the subcommittee on sustainable manufacturing (E60.13). “Product design is a key enabler here because that is when most of the planning is done about the product and the wider systems it engages with. Moreover, design is also where these decisions and any changes in plans can be made at the smallest economic cost.”
The critical role that these early decisions play in the process of creating a new product is one of the reasons Hapuwatte and his colleagues zeroed in on the design phase when they began considering circular design standards several years ago. A work item addressing principles of circular product design was initiated in September 2022, and participation levels provided immediate confirmation of the importance of the standard. The earliest meetings were attended by close to 200 individuals representing many industries, including building products, heavy machinery, medical devices, textiles, electronics, and outdoor gear.
The core drafting team’s international roster faced a number of challenges as the work began, from mundane concerns like managing time zones when scheduling meetings to more substantive issues of terminology and scope.
“The circular economy, or CE, and circularity being comparatively new areas of interest and still evolving, there is a need to build consensus on terminology definitions,” Hapuwatte points out. “Especially due to the number of different sectors involved, the same term may have different interpretations in different settings. Some of the earlier discussions were largely terminology related.
“We also faced challenges related to the scope of the standard, because many of the factors relating to CE and circular product design are fairly broad,” Hapuwatte continues. “For example, we had questions about addressing infrastructure and societal considerations in this guide. We based our decisions on how much those areas are within the product designer’s sphere of influence, as this guide is primarily aimed at supporting the decision-making of the product designers.”
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To that end, the new standard guide for principles of circular product design (E3461) provides an adaptable foundation that different industries can use to build out specific guidelines for their particular applications. “The initial version of the guide provides a structure and offers a broader view of what aspects to consider during product design, and makes sure all product life cycle stages are considered,” says Hapuwatte. “The structure provides a consistent formatting for future guides and related work. Taking a comprehensive life cycle view helps the designer consider the potential trade-offs possible during different stages of the product life cycle due to the changes in product design, and how they may interact with the broader systems involved.”
Hapuwatte notes that future plans call for expanding the guide to include more applications and sector-specific guidelines, as well as system-level considerations (logistics and information sharing, for example) that may be less germane to conventional product design but are nonetheless relevant to circular product design. He and his colleagues anticipate collaborating with industry experts and stakeholders to validate the guidelines in different settings and identify improvements for future additions and revisions to this guide.
While some challenges inherent to circular product design process are common to all (or most) industries, others are dictated by the nature of the products in question. Hapuwatte cites the example of a smartphone to make the point.
“If phone designers focus solely on recoverability of materials at end-of-use, they will choose design elements that make it easier to take the product apart and separate the materials,” he explains. “However, in addition to the cost implications, unless the potential consequences to other stages of product life are considered, those design elements could also lead to reliability issues and be detrimental to functionalities like water resistance. While this is a simplified example, it shows the complexities of designing products for the circular economy.”
Circularity in Healthcare Products
Tom Frantz, director of advanced material development, Technimark LLC, faces the thorny issues surrounding implementation of circular design principles from the perspective of medical product packaging and as a member of the team currently working on a standard guide for designing recyclability of single-use products and packaging used in healthcare applications. (WK88282). Given the staggering amount of waste generated by this industry, the new guide – balloted for the first time in January – is urgently needed.
How does one define “staggering?” Frantz cites a World Health Organization publication that estimates that daily healthcare waste ranges between 1.8 and 10.7 kilograms (3.9 to 23.6 pounds) per occupied hospital bed per day. “This total represents a combination of single-use medical devices and their plastic, paper, and cardboard packaging; anatomical wastes such as tissues and body fluids; waste and residuals from disinfectants, cleaners, and other fluids; food/kitchen waste; medicinal wastes; and protective garb like gloves and gowns,” Frantz says.
While many hospitals are recycling cardboard and paper packaging, other elements of the waste stream are more of a challenge – in particular, single-use products made of mixed materials that have more complex packaging due to sterility requirements. Frantz also notes that a single healthcare facility may receive products from hundreds of suppliers, further complicating the recycling equation.
“It is very easy to make an unrecyclable product or packaging,” he says. “It’s hard to purposefully consider what design features and tradeoffs are required to enable a product or packaging to be successfully processed through the recycling stream.”
The new standard guide enables healthcare product designers to evaluate features that could increase the likelihood of a part being recycled, and to minimize the use of highly mixed and inseparable components that make that recycling process more difficult. Frantz points out that the impetus for the guide came from the industry and the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), which saw the need for a standard specifically tailored to address issues relevant to the medical/healthcare space.
HPRC’s involvement should come as no surprise given the critical importance of plastics to the healthcare industry. Their consistent, predictable, high-performance properties make them suitable for a wide range of medical applications, and they are also widely used in secondary packaging of medical devices.
As work on WK88282 progressed through 2024, Frantz and other members of the subcommittee on sustainable healthcare (E60.42) referenced existing design guidelines from organizations such as HPRC and the Association of Plastics Recyclers. “These documents allowed us to identify key design features that are important to the plastics mechanical recycling process. We were able to collaborate with these organizations and adapt their guidelines,” he says, adding that the new standard guide will consider chemical recycling implications and also cover materials other than plastic.
Frantz believes that the guide’s most impactful benefits will be in the area of single-use products and packaging. With the inclusion of information on barrier materials, labels, adhesives, inks, closures, and dispensers, product designers will be better able to incorporate these elements in ways that allow for a product to be successfully recycled, rather than incinerated or landfilled.
Circularity in Building Products
The third leg of the E60’s latest sustainability trifecta is unusual among ASTM standards in that it was developed by the subcommittee on building and construction (E60.01) as a tool for others to use in developing their own standards. Bill Griese, Deputy Executive Director, Tile Council of North America, traveled the long road to completion of the standard practice for the development of multi-attribute sustainability standards for building products (E3135).
“We had our first meeting on what eventually became the new standard in October of 2014, so we’ve been working on it for over 10 years,” he notes. The catalyst was frustration in the building products community with the fact that the green building standards, codes, and rating systems that were being developed at the time, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Green Globes, and International Green Construction Code, were too focused on individual product attributes.
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Take doors, for instance. What if there’s something more important than a 20% recycled content requirement? What if it’s emissions of volatile organic compounds or the paint being used? For a wooden door, what if reclaimed forestry is more important than recycled content? What if it’s the regionality, how much energy it takes to make it, how long it lasts? “Of course recycled content is important, but sustainability is not about single attributes in isolation, it’s about all attributes and a full life cycle approach,” Griese says.
To make this point, Griese and his colleagues asked the U.S. Green Building Council (the organization that administers the LEED system) to consider incorporating various industry standards in effect at the time (mid-2010s) into the latest LEED version. “The carpet industry had NSF 140, the resilient floor covering industry had NSF 332, the furniture industry had a standard called the BIFMA Level, the ceramic tile industry had ANSI A138.1,” he explains. “We said if you’re standardizing this particular product, here is the standard to use.”
To circumvent any issues that might have arisen over which particular standards from different industries would be added to the running list, an interesting idea began circulating among the members of E60.01.
“We started to think, wouldn’t it be nice if we just had a standard for these standards?” Griese says. “You wouldn’t have to have a running list, you could just say, as another credit to the standard, any product meeting a specification that is developed under a particular ASTM standard is approved for this credit. So that was the idea: We needed a standard for standards to create some framework around these multi-attribute standards if they were ever going to be recognized by LEED and other rating systems.”
When work on E3135 began in 2014, a lot of attention was paid to the process of developing multi-attribute sustainability standards, to the framework for how such standards must be developed and what they look like. “There was a lot of talk around what is a consensus multi-attribute standard,” Griese recounts. “So we defined the consensus process and that took some time. It was second nature, because obviously ASTM being a world-class standards development organization, there was a lot of knowledge in the room.”
It’s important to emphasize that the new standard practice is not a one-size-fits-all solution. According to Griese, “It’s incumbent upon each industry to set the thresholds at each stage of the life cycle for each attribute. That’s what a multi-attribute sustainability standard is, and we think that will really change the game for industry because once each industry has a standard, they can create their own certification programs, they can create their own references to their standards and codes. It’s a way to specify the right products for the right applications, based on the right sustainability principles. And I think it will mitigate confusion in the market. But that could never be done without a standard like this, which provides the overarching framework for how each industry needs to develop said standards.
“We feel the reason this new standard will be helpful is that it will engender a lot of confidence in the marketplace,” Griese concludes. “They’ll know that people who are experts in standards development developed a standard for how a standard needs to be developed.”
July / August 2025
