Prof Low Hong Yee
Head, Engineering Product Development Pillar
Singapore University of Technology and Design
DATE AND TIME
3 July 2024, Wednesday | 10.00am – 11.00am
One of the core elements of a circular economy (C.E.) is to keep material resource in circulation for as long as possible; this translates to the goal in extending the useful life of a physical product. Current sustainability options for end-of-life treatments of products and materials include reuse, recycling, and material recovery.
Reuse and recycling keep materials in use but often results in low-value products. Today, these processes constitute a small percentage of waste treatment and material recovery. As product design trend is towards miniaturization and increase complexity, material recovery using chemical plant and batch processes becomes uneconomical when the amount of material that can be recovered is small.
Consequently, practices of material recovery weight heavily on economic factor and not necessarily the sustainable outcomes. A truly sustainable action must aim to 1) prolong the lifecycle of materials and 2) at ‘absolute’ end-of-life, achieve near zero waste or near 100% material recovery. In this talk, I will share some examples of deliberate design of materials for increased utility and to facilitate the recovery of useful materials from end-of-life products.