A circular economic model is garnering global support across a broad expanse of sectors. The model represents a dramatic transition from the long-employed linear economy (take–make–use–waste) into a regenerative one in which products and materials are kept within the economy through recovery processes including reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling. Cycling materials within the economy not only reduces the demand for raw materials, but also prevents the leakage of materials to unwanted sinks such as the environment, landfills, and incinerators, thereby reducing potential harm to society, the environment, and the economy. Transitioning to a circular economy will further require products to be assessed in terms of not only their function but also their impact on the environment and how well they maintain value. These assessments will need a solid foundation of measurements and practices to bring them to fruition.
Considerable time, thought, and energy is being directed towards enabling this transition. Numerous social, political, and technical strategies are being considered, and to some extent, implemented to affect this necessary change. While the range of organizations participating in these efforts is exceptionally diverse, much of the burden of bringing this vision to a reality will be placed on those who produce goods—i.e., manufacturers. The manufacturing sector transforms materials into products, and hence has a pivotal role to play in assuring that materials are used efficiently and remain in the economy for as long as possible. Manufacturers across sectors and geographic regions are setting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments, including circularity goals, in response to consumer demands, regulations/legislation, and as part of their future planning activities.
Underlying all these efforts is a need for standards to help guide stakeholders, particularly manufacturers, towards synchronized improvements. Standards define basic terminology needed to create a common understanding of shared goals, objectives, and progress. They provide best practices for manufacturers and other sectors to create
products that can be recirculated throughout the economy once they reach the end of their useful life. Standard test methods ensure repeatable and comparable procedures for determining properties of materials and products. Further, reporting standards provide a means for documenting environmental, social, and corporate governance
(ESG) metrics, and can help to anticipate the problems that lie ahead and where more work is needed.
Towards this end, ASTM International’s E60 Committee on Sustainability sought to garner stakeholder input on drivers and barriers facing circular manufacturing and the need for standards to foster a circular economy for manufacturing materials. More specifically, the E60 committee aimed to identify technical standards needed for manufacturers to design and produce products for circularity as well as integrate more diverse feedstocks into production capabilities. Standards are needed to ensure that the outputs of manufacturing operations, both products and by-products, are suitable to re-enter the economy. In this effort, the E60 committee drew on the following sources of information to identify areas where standardization is needed to make substantial improvements to the status quo:
– A survey of manufacturing organizations to understand the current state of the practice towards more sustainable and circular manufacturing approaches,
– A two-day workshop including world-class panelists reporting on current activity supporting circular economy for manufacturing organizations and manufacturing experts who participated in the workshop’s roundtable discussions.
The survey and workshop brought to light several key drivers and barriers facing a circular economy and led to the identification of five categories of standards. As shown in Figure 1, foundational standards underpin the other standards efforts. Systems-support standards facilitate systems thinking in practice and advance the mechanisms
to collect, carry, and provide information throughout the life cycle. The inner boxes in the figure show the types of standards needed in different life cycle phases: front-end design, manufacturing production, back-end recovery, and recycling-related standards. More specifics of the needed standards and their focus areas are described in greater
detail in this report. Successfully implementing the identified standards will assist with ensuring trustworthy and reliable material streams for future manufacturing.
