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Browse Qlopedia topics grouped under Sustainability.
22 topics, showing 1-22 on page 1 of 1.
A material recovery facility, or MRF, is a recycling plant that receives collected recyclables, separates them by material type and grade, removes contamination, and prepares marketable paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, and glass streams for manufacturers or further processors.
A reuse center is a facility or retail operation that accepts usable products, building materials, fixtures, furniture, appliances, or surplus goods and redirects them to new users instead of disposal. Reuse centers preserve product value, reduce waste, and make recovered goods available for repair, resale, donation, or community projects.
A Repair Cafe is a community repair event where people bring broken household items and work with volunteer fixers to diagnose, mend, or maintain them. The model keeps useful goods in service, teaches repair skills, and makes repair a social activity rather than a private chore.
Packaging waste is the discarded material used to contain, protect, transport, display, or sell products. It includes boxes, bottles, cans, wrappers, films, trays, bags, cushioning, labels, and closures, and it is a major focus of waste prevention, recycling, reuse, and producer-responsibility policy.
The reuse economy is the network of businesses, public programs, community groups, and everyday practices that keep products in use through resale, donation, repair, sharing, rental, refurbishment, and direct reuse instead of sending them quickly to recycling or disposal.
Circular procurement is the practice of buying goods, services, works, or outcomes in ways that keep products and materials in use, reduce waste, preserve value, and support circular business models across the full life cycle.
Closed-loop recycling is a recycling model in which a material is collected, processed, and made back into the same kind of product or an equivalent high-value product, reducing the need for virgin material while keeping the material in a repeating cycle.
A take-back program is a system that lets people return used products or packaging to a producer, retailer, collection site, mail-back service, or stewardship organization for reuse, repair, recycling, refurbishment, or safe disposal.
A repairability index is a public score or class that tells buyers how easy a product is expected to be to repair. It translates design choices, spare-part access, documentation, tools, software support, and disassembly steps into a label that can be compared before purchase.
Product stewardship is the idea that everyone involved with a product shares responsibility for reducing its health, safety, environmental, and social impacts across the product life cycle. It can include voluntary industry programs, retailer take-back systems, consumer behavior, and mandatory extended producer responsibility laws.
A deposit-return system is a policy that adds a refundable deposit to products such as beverage containers. Customers get the deposit back when they return the empty container, creating a financial reason to collect bottles and cans for reuse or high-quality recycling.
Design for disassembly is the practice of designing products, buildings, and systems so they can be taken apart safely and economically. It helps parts, materials, and components stay useful through repair, reuse, remanufacturing, recycling, or future deconstruction.
Critical raw materials are minerals and other materials considered economically important and vulnerable to supply disruption. They matter for batteries, wind turbines, electronics, defense, aerospace, medical devices, agriculture, and many industrial supply chains.
Urban mining is the recovery of valuable materials from products, buildings, infrastructure, and waste already circulating in cities and economies. Instead of extracting only from geological ores, it treats discarded electronics, vehicles, batteries, cables, appliances, and demolition materials as secondary resource deposits.
Material flow analysis, or MFA, is a method for tracking physical materials as they enter, move through, accumulate in, and leave a defined system. It helps governments, researchers, and companies understand resource use, waste, trade, and circular economy performance.
Industrial ecology studies how materials, energy, products, wastes, and emissions move through industrial and consumer systems. It treats the economy as a physical system connected to ecosystems, not just as money, markets, or isolated factories.
An environmental product declaration, or EPD, is a verified document that reports life cycle environmental data for a product or service. EPDs are widely used for construction materials because they help buyers compare embodied carbon and other impacts under defined rules.
A digital product passport, or DPP, is a structured digital record that links a product to information about materials, sustainability, repair, compliance, and end-of-life handling. In the European Union, DPPs are being developed through ecodesign and battery rules to make product data easier to share across value chains.
Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with making, transporting, installing, maintaining, replacing, and disposing of materials and products. In buildings and infrastructure, it highlights the climate impact hidden in concrete, steel, glass, insulation, finishes, and construction work.
Life cycle assessment, or LCA, is a structured method for estimating environmental impacts across a product, service, or process life cycle. It looks beyond one factory or one use phase to examine raw materials, manufacturing, transport, use, repair, recycling, and disposal.
Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, is a policy approach that makes producers responsible for managing products after consumers are done with them. It can shift some collection, recycling, and disposal costs from local governments to the companies that place products on the market.
Industrial symbiosis is collaboration among companies, utilities, and public agencies so one operation's by-products, waste heat, water, logistics, or infrastructure become useful inputs for another. It turns circular economy ideas into practical exchanges inside industrial regions.