Education for optimized Life Cycle Management: The Project e-CIRP and its insights into embedding circular economy aspects to product design via teaching

¹ Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland and Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland
² Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP, Germany
³ Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland
⁴ Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
⁵ University of Padova, Italy
⁶ LUT University, Finland
⁷ University of Jyväskylä, Finland
⁸ Metso Outotec, Finland
⁹ Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

^* Corresponding author: niclas.sandstrom@helsinki.fi

Abstract

The integration of circular economy-based life cycle management (LCM) into product design and optimisation is essential for the transformation towards a circular economy (CE). However, companies often lack the expertise to adapt life-cycle design (LCD) thinking in their business operations and are in need of respective capacity building. To close this apparent gap is the aim of the project e-CirP (Embedding Circular Economy into Product Design and Optimization) where LUT University, Fraunhofer, Technical University of Denmark, University of Padova, Delft University of Technology, University of Helsinki and Metso Outotec have worked together to develop a program that allows Master students across Europe to learn how to integrate CE and Life Cycle Thinking principles into product design by analysing real industrial cases. In the project, modern pedagogical approaches have been applied. A modular training package covering general circular economy aspects, as well as detailed value chain perspectives, has been created. Next to the content-related aspects, a great focus was also on the support of so-called soft-skills development, e.g. through international student cooperation on case studies. The paper presents the perspective of participating students as well as the cooperating companies that supplied the industry cases to allow an overview of opportunities and challenges.