Product Development Based on Circular

Economy Premises Using Polymeric Residues

from a Manufacturing Process of Pencils

Laura Lima da Rocha1 , Marcelo Albuquerque de Oliveira1(B) ,

Fabiane Patrícia Marques de Azevedo1 , and António Cardoso2
1 Federal University of Amazonas, Gal. Rodrigo Otávio Ave., 6200 - Coroado I, Manaus,
AM 69080-900, Brazil
[email protected]
2 Fernando Pessoa University, Praça de 9 de Abril 349, 4249-004 Porto, Portugal

Abstract. Society’s awareness of environmental issues over the years caused

improvements in the way that the world consumes natural resources and then
sustainability surged up. In this way, many business models have been created,
and Circular Economy is considered one of the newest models, which is where
the idea of the Circular Product emerged. In this research, a product was created
with the fundamentals of circularity, where: its material composition is not raw but
contaminated polystyrene (PS) collected from residues of pencil manufacturing;
the manufacturing process must be clean and efficient because it is essential not to
generate more waste. With this, it is possible to maintain human and environmental
safety and at the same time, meet the consumer’s expectations.

Keywords: Circular economy · Circular product · Polymer recycling

1 Introduction
Environmental concern became a present agenda in the social environment after scientific
studies about the deterioration of the environment, especially in 1987 with the launch of
the Brundtland Report. In this report, it is already scientifically evidenced that millions
of hectares of forests are destroyed annually and that the burning of fossil fuels emits
greenhouse gases, for example.
With these problems, the concept of sustainable development was formulated with
the objective of imposing limitations based on the present state of all-natural resources,
integrated with the biosphere’s ability to absorb the effects of human activities and,
from that, it was understood that sustainability aims to conduct actions that respect the
ecological part of the planet [1]. However, more than three decades after this milestone for
the environment, humanity still faces the exacerbated consumption of natural resources
together with the consequences of these acts, showing that transforming the current
lifestyle of the world to a sustainable one is an arduous and difficult task that requires
collaboration from all sectors of society [2, 3].

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

L. Pereira et al. (Eds.): IDEAS 2022, DSI, pp. 172–179, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29129-6_16
 Product Development Based on Circular Economy Premises 173

In this work, it is aimed to create a product applying the Circular Economy (CE)
where the economic and environmental value of materials are preserved for as long
as possible to keep them in the economic system and these actions are carried out in
a sustainable way, as they contribute to the reuse and recycling of waste that causes
adverse impacts on the environment [4, 5].

2 Literature Review

2.1 Circular Economy

The circular economy emerged as a solution to contribute to sustainable development.
This model does not have an extremely defined concept, however, the thinking of several
authors on the subject is similar [6]. According to [7], CE is an example of biomimicry,
as it is based on the laws that govern nature. The lesson provided by nature that based
this methodology was to follow the natural cycle of organic life, where the dead organic
material ends up becoming a resource (nutrient) for the next generations of organisms.
In other words, bringing this approach to the economic business scenario, the new law
that will govern “dead products” (which are waste such as, for example, gas emissions
resulting from production processes) will be to insert it back into the production chain.
CE is an economic-sustainable system that aims to reverse the current scenario of
the linearity of the product’s life cycle (extract, process, consume and dump), trans-
forming it into a closed cyclical loop. This means that the objective is to keep the
product/material always available to be used, instead of dumping them, so that the con-
sumption of resources and energy are minimized. In addition, the logistical processes of
distribution and packaging must be also rethought in a sustainable way [8, 9].
One of the CE paradigms involves five phases: material input, design, production,
consumption and management of resources at the “end of life”. Products and processes
are designed not to become tailings quickly and, when there are tailings, it is agreed
that they must be reused to extract the most of their value and that they return to the
production cycle or then return to the biosphere in a safe way [6, 10, 11]. In addition,
it must be used renewable energy, eliminate the use of toxic chemicals and eliminate
whatever can become waste in material, product design and systems [12].
To facilitate the design of a product or circular system, eco-design methods help the
product to reuse, reform and recycle. what governs this technique is the importance of
maintaining resources efficiency and having the attributions of being durable, repairable,
recyclable, and upgradable (functional or parametric changes in a product) [6, 10, 13].

2.2 Circular Product Design

CE proposes that the value of the materials be maintained for a longer life of the products
or by looping them back in the system to be reused. The creation of value through
design must include strategies that integrate economic and environmental value and so
the economic system can reuse products, however, the product remanufacturing process
cannot emit pollutants or consume fossil fuels because there will still be strong adverse
impacts on the environment and circularity will not be met [4, 14, 15].
174 L. L. da Rocha et al.

For circularity to exist, all the resources that entered this system must remain useful
throughout its life cycle, everything must be designed so that there is no waste, however,
he states that there will always be losses because there is a flow of materials where it is
extremely difficult to recover and natural systems must be regenerated [4, 15].
[4] mentions that when designing a circular product, designers must prevent a product
from becoming obsolete and ensure that materials are recovered with the highest level of
integrity possible. A product is circular when these goals are achieved using the ideals of
design for product integrity or design for recycling. The concept of design for recycling
is quite widespread and simple, as the objective is to ensure that the materials that make
up a product can be recycled as efficiently and effectively as possible so that it returns
to the economic chain [4].
A product has a circular flow of materials when: a product has a technological cycle
(designers aim to keep material or “technical nutrients” to be continuously and safely
recycled; designed for a biological cycle, (in this, materials are biodegraded to start a
new cycle); designed for dis- and reassembly [16]. These strategies belong from closing
loops.

3 Methodology
Bibliographic research was carried out in Scopus with the objective of gathering infor-
mation about the current concepts of Circular Economy and about polymers recycling.
With this, a brainstorming was made in order to planning and develop a product with
the technology and other resources restrictions.
Beyond that, the selected strategy of Circular Product Design was the closing-loop,
since one of the focuses is to recycle material and enable reuse. In this way, the material
used to compose is a contaminated polymer, more specifically, polystyrene with other
residues of other types of polymers. Since the material is mostly composed of thermo-
plastic polymers, it is possible to heat and mold it to transform in a product without
significant degradation of the polymer in a cheaper way, and a prototype was created
based on this.
Following these premises, brainstorming was used in order to define what type of
products would be possible to manufacture from these leftovers of the production process
and then the CAD was used to design the products.

4 Results

The process used to manufacture the prototype was the remelting process. The plastic
was heated in a furnace with the temperature about 230 °C until the polymer became a
viscous liquid and then it was molded by being pressed into a metal plate. After this, the
prototype was cooled and, consequently, solidified (Fig. 1).
 Product Development Based on Circular Economy Premises 175

Fig. 1. Prototype.

After seeing the behavior of the plastic, designs were proposed in Autodesk Fusion
360 which are (Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5):

Fig. 2. Ruler.

The stool was the developed with the support of a sustainable woodshop company to
maintain the circularity of reusing and recycling. And the seat base was decorated with
the recycled polymer as shown in Fig. 6.
176 L. L. da Rocha et al.

Fig. 3. Storage holder.

Fig. 4. Pencil case.

 Product Development Based on Circular Economy Premises 177

Fig. 5. Stool.

Fig. 6. Stool manufactured with recycled wood and residues of colored pencil as the seat base.

5 Conclusion

The replacement of raw material by a material that is reused, recycled or compostable

is important for the development of innovative and light materials, which reduce the
exploitation and consumption of fossil materials, and the entire emission of pollutants
that occurs throughout the cycle of a product’s life. It is known that polymer is a chal-
lenger type of material to recycling, but this specifical material received from a company
behaved as a simple thermoplastic that can me remolded and it is ready to remanufacture
and that means that this company is having a big cost of opportunity. Furthermore, the
178 L. L. da Rocha et al.

waste used in this work was considered difficult for the company to reuse but, as shown
previously, it was easy to reuse.
Another important factor in moving towards circularity is that, in the last 50 years,
the production of non-recyclable consumer materials has grown dramatically to the point
that, annually, there are adverse environmental impacts on large scales, such as plastic,
which at least 8 million tons, “leak” into the oceans and this has direct consequences for
all existing life in that place [17]. In addition, the stimulus and insertion in the circularity
model is important for the advancement of technology, as it is necessary to have technical
resources to enable the production of a circular product, in addition to using “cleaner”
resources so that there is maintenance of the circularity sustainability.

Acknowledgments. Special thanks to the Master’s Program in Production Engineering at the

Federal University of Amazonas for the support of its professors for the research carried out. This
work was conducted in partnership with the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) within the
scope of the Master’s Program in Production Engineering (PPGEP). The authors wish to thank the
project partner Amazon State Foundation for Research Support (FAPEAM - Fundação de Apoio à
Pesquisa do Estado do Amazonas) for supporting this work under POSGRAD Project (Resolution
No. 008/2021 – POSGRAD 2021).

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