Data-Driven Design for Product Recovery

Summary

US industry needs to recover critical materials to reduce its dependence on foreign suppliers and insulate supply chains from global disruptions. These materials are essential for new technologies, but the US currently imports over 80% of them. Recovering these materials from existing waste streams and through improved domestic processing can secure supply chains, promote sustainability, and foster economic growth.

Design principles and practices have emerged to account for recovery; however, more research is needed to systemize this knowledge, disseminate best practices, and provide metrics for stakeholders to track and improve their recovery efforts. The Data-Driven Design for Recovery project will develop standards, metrics, and data-driven methods to evaluate the recoverability of products and improve domestic supply-chain resilience. This will be accomplished with the application of computational and data-driven design methods to complex product architectures and validated with case studies and pilots in energy storage, electronics, and integrated circuits (ICs or Chips).

Description

Objective
To develop standards, metrics, and data-driven methods that can be implemented in early product design stages to increase the efficacy of end-of-use product recovery pathways and keep valuable products in the economy and recover valuable materials. 
 

Technical Idea
The Data-Driven Design for Product Recovery project will develop measurement science artifacts to assist industry stakeholders in utilizing product recovery instead of landfilling and ultimately increasing the retention of valuable resources in our domestic economy.

These artifacts include case studies, metrics, reference models, and standards that can drive the integration of design for recovery principles into engineering practices and give users greater influence on the connection between product design choices and resource efficiency goals. 

This project is partitioned along the following thrusts:

• Standards and metrics for circular design and evaluation
• AI and computational methods for design decision support
• Data-driven design to enable electronic and microelectronic recovery 

Research Plan
This project will incorporate systems thinking and interdisciplinary approaches to establish benchmarks, metrics, and decision-support methodologies for product designers and engineers with the goal of increasing product recovery. It will incorporate systems thinking and interdisciplinary approaches to validate findings for a variety of product families and integrate with existing design practices.

Specifically, the project will expand our foundational work in product design and standards to complex product architectures and technologies with a focus on battery and energy storage, consumer electronics, and microelectronics (such as integrated circuits or chips). Metrics that can be utilized during conceptual and system design will be established to evaluate recovery pathways (e.g., reuse, refurbish, recycle) for these products. The research will be conducted in partnership with stakeholders and validated through case studies and piloting efforts. This project will also integrate computational design methods, including optimization and AI techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing, to enhance design performance, decision-making confidence, and speed. This will help designers rapidly identify key design principles, quantitatively evaluate design trade-offs, or determine data needs and develop datasets to support recovery operations for the products of interest. Finally, this project will publish metric databases for product recovery as well as process models to facilitate the exchange of data among stakeholders across a product's lifecycle and value chain.

Highlights

Standards
ASTM WK83603 Principles of Circular Product Design.
ISO 59010 Circular Economy: Guidance on the transition of business models and value networks
ISO 59004 Circular Economy: Terminology, principles, and guidance for implementation
ISO 59020 Circular Economy: Measuring and assessing circularity

Research Publications
Circular Economy: A Product Life Cycle Perspective on Engineering and Manufacturing Practices, Procedia CIRP.
Optimizing Product Life Cycle Systems for Manufacturing in a Circular Economy, GCSM.
Adapting Modern Product Design to the Circular Economy, IDETC-CIE.
A Critical Analysis of Circular Product Attributes and Limitations of Product Circularity Assessment Methods (RCR)
Designing Products for the Circular Economy: A Review of Principles from 260 Sources

Technical Workshops
Fostering a Circular Economy of Manufacturing Materials, ASTM-NIST, 2022.
Design for a Circular Economy: Addressing the Nexus of Research, Standards and Education, ASME-NIST, 2023.

Created April 26, 2024, Updated July 2, 2026