Toward Sustainable Packaging of Electronic Products: A Circular Economy Perspective
摘要
Circular economy and sustainability are the two key principles increasingly influencing the modern-day world across various industries. The electronics industry is considered to be the most critical of applying these two principles because of its fast pace and a critical need for sustainable development and climate action. This emphasizes the need to look at the environmental footprint of this specific industry and its responsibilities very critically where packaging is one of the most important environmental impacts within the electronics industry. The concepts of the circular economy specifically focus on the durability or size of the packaging, but also on the materials used, with emphasis put on sustainability. This research will basically seek to determine how electronic packaging can offer direct contribution to the case of sustainability. It essentially pursues the enlightenment of the process under which circular economy can be integrated into electronic packaging design to solve the design conflicts with sustainability by circular design principles. This research will apply the method of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) for the evaluation of consumer expectations with relation to the circular design in electronic packaging—considered to be the (“What’s”)—and derivation of the design criteria that result in meeting such expectations—this being the (“How’s”). It is set to discuss the design of electronic packaging in a new perspective, taking into consideration both customer and technical expectations versus circularity and sustainability. The expected results from this paper are the identification of the most important consumer expectations and then the transformation to design requirements and aims to present useful insights to the managers in the industry regarding the important relationship between the design of electronic packaging and sustainability within the idea of circular economy.