AI can help designers create circular economies

The world must recycle and reuse more products to limit the extraction of virgin materials and reduce greenhouse gases that cause climate change. But sorting waste is often more difficult than one might imagine.

Now researchers writing in the journal npj Urban Sustainability are recommending better information management, three-dimensional scanning, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to develop more sustainable circular economies.

In a July 4 article entitled “Emergent digital possibilities for design-led reuse within circular economy,” University of South Australia design scholars Guy Keulemans and Roxane Adams noted that recycling worldwide has declined from 9 to 7 percent since 2018 while the amount of materials extracted since 2018 is roughly equal to everything extracted throughout the entire 20th Century.

“A key explanation for these failures are the continuing attempts to fit circular economy practices onto existing linear, waste-making practices in ways that do not substantially change the paradigms of techniques, technologies, labour and practice within the design industry,” the co-authors wrote.

Designers, however, could plan construction and other projects with reuse in mind, however, they argued, especially with the help of advanced technologies.

Computer-aided design and other approaches that leverage technology could improve how products are disassembled, deconstructed, inventoried, conceptualized, fabricated, and eventually used with their future reused purposes in mind, they claimed These concepts would inform transportation, waste management, and a host of other issues that now often discourage designers, developers, and others from incorporate circular economic techniques in their work. ce/jd