Circular Design 101 - part 1

How might we regenerate nature through design? A four-part series.

For the past eight+ years, I’ve practiced circular design through experimental clothing label A.BCH. Over this time, I developed a circular design framework to help with the implementation side of circular design. I did this because I see a lot of theoretical stuff out there and practice-led work can be very narrowly focused. I wanted to create a framework that could be broadly adopted by any clothing designer, and the cool thing is that this framework became the basis of a project I’ve been working on with RMIT University, Julie Boulton and Country Road Group the past 12 months. In just a few weeks, we’ll be releasing an open source Circular Design Guide that gives a very practical process to anyone wanting to design clothing for circularity. I’ll let you know when that’s all published, but in the meantime, I’ve put together a high-level overview of the frameworks. This is what I teach my students and offer to businesses who want to learn about circular design.

I’m obsessed with circular design (in case you hadn’t noticed) as a series of decisions and actions that can actively regenerate nature. I personally believe that regenerating nature is the central principle for a circular economy, as I think it helps us avoid some of the more common traps of circular economy thinking, such as a disproportionate focus on recycling, a failure to account for human and environmental impacts and neglecting future shared value creation.

Key Learnings as a Circular Designer

If I had to sum up my biggest takeaways from my experience designing this way, I’d say the following:

• Setting clear design and material guardrails and adhering to them is essential

• The function of “design” must be reimagined to take active responsibility for the entire product lifecycle

• Collaboration across the value chain is critical - relationships are key to circular design buy-in

• There are no perfect solutions - you will constantly need to assess tradeoffs and impacts should be considered in context

• Constraints can lead to innovation and beauty

• No matter how much symptom treating you do, addressing the root cause will become inevitable for meaningful change

Photo: Lily Clatworthy for A.BCH

First, why does design matter?

I’m a designer. So yeah. I’m going to be design biased. But I truly believe in order to address the impacts of fashion and textiles globally, that it’s imperative to transform the function of design.

We know the big numbers. 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources are extracted and 93 billion cubic metres of water are consumed by the fashion and textile industry each year (Ellen McArthur Foundation). It’s also the third highest emitter of greenhouse gasses globally (Institute of Positive Fashion). Look at the table below, extracted from WRAP UK Textiles 2030 Report, and you’ll see that the greatest areas of impact for carbon, water and waste lie predominantly in the raw materials and production phases - often dictated by design. I’ll also argue that design contributes to the waste impacts in the End of Life phase. Of course other forces are at play like marketing, planning and allocation, merchandising and inefficient processes - all of which need to come to the party to support and enable better design in tandem. I do however believe in the unique function of the designer to lead transformative change for the products they are creating.

For anyone who needs a refresher, the current status for creating product is a linear system where humans take (resources), make (products), use (products for a while) and waste (those products when we’re bored with them or they no longer function). It’s an overwhelmingly extractive relationship with the world’s natural resources and it produces consumers as opposed to citizens or stewards. It does not allow for the inherent regeneration of nature and it does not help us measure anything other than economic productivity as a marker of success.

The Circular System is different and embodies three core principles:

1. Regenerate Nature

2. Eliminate Waste and Pollution

3. Circulate Products and Materials at their Highest Value

   

These three Circular Economy Principles are driven by design & underpinned by a transition to renewable energy and materials (Ellen McArthur Foundation) and encourages us to measure impact on planetary ecosystem and human health as well as resource stewardship as markers of success.

The Ellen McArthur Foundation also states that “a circular economy decouples economic activity from the consumption of finite resources and should be a resilient system that is good for business, people and the environment.”

As no-brainer as that sounds, reality paints a very different picture of where we’re at (the linear system). Instead of heading towards a decoupling of economic activity and the consumption of finite resources, we’re doing the opposite. Material Market Reports by Textile Exchange show that global fibre production for textiles reached an all-time high of 124 million tonnes in 2023 and is expected to climb to 160 million tonnes by 2030. Less than 1% of this is from recycled clothing sources, and no, I do not count recycled plastic bottles used to create new polyester clothing as recycled. More on that later. From a renewability perspective, less than 25% of these fibres are from a renewable source.

Circular Product + Circular Business + Circular System

How does all this fit in with the concept of circularity? Let’s say demand does not drop. At a minimum, we’d need to swap 75% of the fibres the industry is using today (nearly 100 million tonnes) to renewable or recycled fibres. Where will they come from exactly? Recycling technology is not yet where it needs to be and the 14% of polyester that currently comes from recycled sources is overwhelmingly from rPET (recycled plastic bottles mostly - that are effectively downcycled into textiles and can never be recycled back into a bottle again) and this is nothing but a red herring for textile recycling progress.

The fact of the matter is, most clothing quality is far to poor to be recycled into clothing again and the materials within them are mixed to the point of unfeasible separation, making recycling next to impossible and the reason why less than 1% ever makes it that far. Sure there are nascent technologies for sorting, separation and even recycling fibres, but there are also many obstacles to overcome, from scalability to investment in post-pilot adoption, to quality feedstock competition, logistics and, importantly, upstream design for circularity. The fact remains, even with a burst of recycling innovation, we still need to drastically reduce the amount of resources we are using each year - not increase it by 36 million tonnes in just seven years. So two things will remain imperative no matter what: we must make less stuff and we must value the resources we use much more.

This is where it’s important to look at the three levels of circular intervention.

Circular Products- where individual products are designed specifically for circular use and recovery and includes planning, documentation and delivery of predefined circular outcomes.

Circular Business Models- where the models of how businesses make money are adapted to include facility level changes and/or r-strategy services in order to reduce material consumption (think: re-use, re-style, repair, remanufacture and repurpose) and organisations actively invest in the system requirements by building or acquiring them.

Circular Ecosystems- where stakeholders and organisations come together (both internally and externally) to align on definitions and outcomes, supported by policy change. This is where the network effect begins to kick in and multiple stakeholders can share in value creation.

For the purpose of this 101, we’ll be focussing on the design of Circular Products and the decisions a designer and their teams are influential over. There are certainly some overlaps when it comes to Circular Business Models, however these will primarily need to come from an organisational or facility level action. Circular Ecosystems will begin to self organise the more that policy shifts to enforce Extended Producer Responsibility (such as Seamless in Australia) and Circular Economy Transition for governments, businesses and individuals.

Design to Regenerate Nature - How do we actually do that?

There are five key design actions that we, as designers, can take. The first three are in regards to individual product design and the last two are ongoing process steps that include both an increase action and decrease action.

Today has been a bit of a scene setter, but in my next post, Circular Design 101 - part 2, I’ll outline the high-level framework for how we can start designing for circularity today. The goal is to introduce designers and their product teams to the actions that contribute to the central principle of the circular economy - regenerating nature.

Stay tuned for part 2 arriving in your inbox next week!

On another note: I’m currently doing some exciting work through the Country Road Climate Fund for Circular Sourcing - namely, building an impact calculator for surplus material use alongside an open source designer guide for implementing a surplus sourcing strategy.

With 4 million tonnes of surplus textiles (at least) being generated every year and as resource use becomes more scrutinised, surplus is going to become increasingly essential for sourcing strategies in the future. There are some nuances to be aware of when sourcing surplus and the literature out there is rarely practitioner led so I’m keen to share my learnings and experiences with you. If you’re interested in getting first access to the tool and guide, you can sign up to our waitlist here. I’ll also be releasing some exclusive content around this for our circular business community!

Thanks for reading,

Courtney