About the tool
The Circularity Assessment Tool is an excel based tool which can be used to evaluate how circular your developed concepts are and how well the Guidelines for Circular Product Development have been implemented in the concepts. It is recommended that you have used or at least read through these guidelines before applying the tool.
With the Circularity Assessment Tool, you can evaluate your developed concepts based how well they fulfil important guidelines. The Circularity Potential Score for each of the guidelines depend on how important the individual guideline is and the level of fulfilment for the concepts. A high importance and low fulfilment is problematic and results in a high score (the lower the better). The Total Circularity Potential Score is the sum of the scores for each guideline and should be as low as possible. The tool can be used to compare different concepts and/or identify areas of improvement on the concept(s).
How to apply the tool?
In the downloadable excel tool, an instructions sheet gives a detailed overview of how the tool should be applied. The overall step for using the tool are:
Step 1
Assemble a suitable assessment team of stakeholders involved in the product development and get an overview of the guidelines and what they entail using the Guidelines for Circular Product Design and Development.
Step 2
Evaluate the importance of each of the guidelines for each concept. This is done by giving a score from 0 to 3, where 3=really important, 2=moderately important, 1=slightly important and 0=not important.
Step 3
Evaluate level of fulfilment of the guidelines for each concept, by giving the score 1, 3 or 5, where 1=yes, the guideline has been completely fulfilled by this concept, 3=somehow but can be improved and 5=no, the guideline has not been fulfilled by this concept and it has to be.
Step 4
Look at the Circularity potential score for each guideline. High scores indicate improvements can be made to increase the circularity, while low scores indicate that changes are less critical or not necessary.
Step 5
Look at the Total Circularity Potential Scores for each concept. The lower the score, the better the circularity.
Step 6
Use the visual representation of results to choose between concepts or find areas of improvement
When to apply the tool?
The Circularity Assessment Tool should the used in the concept development phase, both for early product concepts and for concept selection before proceeding to the system level design phase.
The Circularity Assessment Tool is one of the tools presented in the CIRCit project to help in Circular Product Development (WP3). Read more about the results of this focus area, explore other tools which can help in developing circular products and download the inspiring workbook here.
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