Resource Pressure of Carpets: Guiding Their Circular Design

Abstract

When designing a product, many decisions are made that determine the environmental impacts that the product will eventually exert on our planet. Therefore, it is paramount to have considered the environmental performance already in the design phase. In this contribution, we showcase the application of the recently developed resource pressure (RP) method to assess the environmental sustainability of various carpet design alternatives. This method consists of qualitative guidelines and a quantitative indicator. With the Earth’s carrying capacity as a reference, the product system is evaluated in relation to its consumption of primary resources and the final generation of waste. Several scenarios are developed by following the design guidelines provided by this method. Those scenarios aim at identifying the most promising circular strategies for reducing the products’ resource pressure. To assess the validity of the RP method, the results are compared to a simplified LCA study. This comparison showed a close correlation for most of the considered impact categories. It confirms that the RP method can effectively predict environmental impacts across a wide range of impact categories, reducing the amount of necessary data and simplifying the calculations. It can therefore support designers in considering the environmental effects easily, from the beginning of the design process onward. Moreover, the simplicity of this method makes it attractive for application by practitioners who are not themselves experts in environmental assessments.