Circular procurement
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.
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Closed-loop recycling
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.
Take-back program
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.
Repairability index
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
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.
Deposit-return system
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.
Reverse logistics
Reverse logistics is the movement of goods, materials, packaging, and information from customers or end users back toward sellers, manufacturers, repairers, recyclers, or disposal systems. It turns returns and end-of-life products into a managed supply-chain function.
Design for disassembly
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
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
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
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
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.
Remanufacturing
Remanufacturing is an industrial process that takes a used product or component, disassembles and restores it, and returns it to like-new or better-than-new performance. It keeps more material, labor, and design value in use than ordinary recycling.
Environmental product declaration
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.
Digital product passport
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
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
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.
Right to repair
Right to repair is the idea that people and independent repair shops should have practical access to the parts, tools, manuals, software, and diagnostics needed to fix products they own. It connects consumer choice, competition, product design, and waste reduction.
Extended producer responsibility
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
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.
Carbon mineralization
Carbon mineralization is the process of turning carbon dioxide into solid carbonate minerals. It happens naturally when CO2 reacts with certain rocks, and engineers are studying ways to speed it up for durable carbon storage and carbon dioxide removal.
Transit-oriented development
Transit-oriented development creates compact, walkable, mixed-use places near high-quality transit so more daily trips can be made without relying on a private car.
Oral history
Oral history is the practice of recording, preserving, and interpreting people's spoken memories as historical evidence and cultural record.
Synthetic biology
Synthetic biology applies engineering ideas to biology, designing or redesigning genetic parts, cells, organisms, and biological systems for useful purposes.
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