Circular economy: an answer to obsolescence

Over the last few decades, questions have been raised about the obsolescence of products, leading to problems of raw material supply and increased waste. Indeed, numerous socio-economic studies show that natural resources are running out, and that our consumption patterns are producing large quantities of waste that is damaging our environment and leading to climate change. From a societal point of view, behavioral changes in consumption and usage patterns would have to be drastic to have rapid, positive effects on the environment, and therefore cannot be the only lever for action. In response, governments at both national and European level are introducing legislation to encourage companies to set up recycling processes for products that have already been sold. A long-term course of action in the face of this recycling challenge is the implementation of the circular economy, which focuses on the way we produce, use and recycle products at the end of their useful life, in order to consume less energy and fewer raw materials.

This article proposes (i) to formalize the industrial regeneration process by applying the principle of biomimicry, (ii) to define the internal activities of regeneration and apply it to the different levels of product architecture, and (iii) to integrate regeneration into the different types of obsolescence in order to provide some answers.