IKEA Circular Product Design Guide 2024
How to Use This Guide
This guide is designed to help product designers and developers understand the key principles of creating products with circular capabilities. It provides clear direction on how to build products that support reuse, recycling, and long-term sustainability.
By following these guidelines, IKEA aims to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by a circular economy, benefiting both the company and its customers through more sustainable product design and reduced environmental impact.
What Is a Circular Economy?
A circular economy is a sustainable system where materials are never treated as waste. Instead, resources are continuously reused and kept in circulation, helping to protect and regenerate nature.
In this system, products and materials are designed to stay useful for as long as possible through processes such as reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling. This reduces the need for new raw materials and minimizes environmental impact.
The circular economy also helps address major global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and waste. It works by separating economic growth from the use of limited natural resources, creating a more sustainable and balanced way of production and consumption.
Circularity from the Customer’s Perspective
Customer behavior is changing as people become more aware of their impact on the environment. Many individuals are now living in smaller spaces and choosing to own fewer but more meaningful items that they truly value.
While most people do not want to create waste, they often find it difficult to let go of items that still seem useful or valuable. At the same time, there is growing interest in products made from recycled materials and a clear shift away from disposable goods.
However, many consumers still feel that choosing sustainable options can be complicated or inconvenient.
Companies like IKEA can support this shift by designing products with circularity in mind and offering solutions that make it easier for customers to reuse, refurbish, remanufacture, and recycle products in a practical and accessible way.
Circular Loops
Circular loops are the foundation of IKEA’s transition toward a circular business model. They influence every part of the business, including how IKEA interacts with customers, how products and services are designed, and how materials are sourced and managed throughout the supply chain.
These circular loops define key processes such as reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling. The main purpose of these processes is to preserve as much value as possible and extend the lifespan of products, parts, and materials for both customers and IKEA.
By designing products with circular capabilities from the beginning, IKEA ensures that items can continuously move through these circular loops, supporting a more sustainable and resource-efficient system.
Reuse
Once a customer purchases a product, it enters the first circular loop known as reuse. Reuse refers to the way customers use and maintain products in their everyday lives. This includes proper care, regular maintenance, small repairs, or upgrades to keep the product in good condition as their needs change over time.
Reuse also involves passing products on to others when they are no longer needed, as well as supporting secondhand markets where items can continue to be used instead of being discarded.
Refurbishment
Refurbishment is the process of restoring used or slightly damaged products back to a near “like-new” condition. This process is carried out either by IKEA or by approved third parties outside the customer’s home.
During refurbishment, products are carefully inspected, cleaned, and repaired if needed. In some cases, they may also be upgraded or recertified before being reintroduced into the market for reuse. This helps extend the life of products and reduces waste by keeping them in circulation for longer.
Remanufacturing
Remanufacturing is the process of taking usable parts from dismantled products and using them to create new products. Instead of discarding components, they are recovered, processed, and reintegrated into production, helping reduce waste and make better use of existing resources.
Recycling
Recycling is the process of converting product parts into new raw materials. These materials can then be used again within IKEA or in external supply chains to produce new items.
Recycling represents the final stage in a product’s lifecycle. Before reaching this stage, every effort is made to explore earlier circular options such as reuse, refurbishment, and remanufacturing. Only when these options are no longer possible are materials directed into recycling, ensuring maximum value is extracted from each product part.
Circularity and Democratic Design
Democratic Design is the foundation of every IKEA product. It is IKEA’s approach to designing, developing, and evaluating products to ensure they combine good function, attractive form, long-lasting quality, sustainability, and affordable pricing.
Circular design principles are an important part of the sustainability aspect within Democratic Design. These principles focus on creating products that perform well during their intended use while also considering how their lifespan can be extended through reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling.
By integrating circular thinking into the design process from the beginning, IKEA ensures that products are not only useful and durable but also prepared for multiple life cycles, supporting a more sustainable future.
No “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach to Circular Product Design
Circular design principles are used to better understand and define how products can be developed with circular capabilities in mind. These principles guide designers in considering reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling at different stages of a product’s life cycle.
However, not every product has the same potential for circular processes. The ability to apply reuse or recycling strategies depends on factors such as the product type, its expected lifespan, how it moves through circular systems, and the materials used in its construction.
Because of these differences, there is no universal or “one-size-fits-all” solution for circular product design. Instead, a combination of relevant circular design principles is applied to each product.
Together, these principles help ensure that products are designed to last as long as possible and can eventually be transformed into valuable resources for new products at the end of their life cycle.
Circular design principles
Design Instructions
Design for renewable or recycled materials
Using renewable or recycled materials.
In a world of limited resources, we want to use materials that are already in use (recycled) or that can be regenerated (renewable). With this we aim to end dependency on virgin fossilbased materials and their negative consequences for people and planet. Using renewable and recycled materials also helps prevent future material scarcity.
Design for Standardization
Design for standardization focuses on reducing variation in materials, components, dimensions, and other product elements. By limiting unnecessary differences, products become more consistent and easier to manage throughout their lifecycle.
This approach increases compatibility between products, parts, and materials, which helps enable more efficient care, repair, upgrading, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling.
Using standardized dimensions, platforms, fittings, colors, and materials also supports modular design. It makes it easier to replace or exchange parts when needed and reduces the number of spare parts that must be produced and stored. Overall, standardization improves efficiency and strengthens circular product flows.
