This study presents a methodology that allows the analysis of how an existing product design meets the design guidelines required from the circular economy perspective, and which are the design guidelines that would need to be incorporated into its design to become a better circular design product. For that, as a starting point, the design guidelines required for the circular product design have been identified from an extensive literature review. Then, criteria have been defined to measure the margin of improvement of a product design based on the level of compliance of each circular design guideline, and the relevance of each circular design guideline for the specific product category to which it belongs. Finally, the methodology has been applied to a representative sample of 127 appliances belonging to different categories of small household electrical and electronic equipment. The circular design guidelines related to extending life span and to product/components reuse have been identified as those that more urgently need to be incorporated, while the urgency of those related to connectors or product structure is moderate.

这项研究提出了一种方法，可以从循环经济的角度分析现有产品设计如何满足所需的设计指南，以及将这些设计指南纳入其设计中才能成为更好的圆形设计产品的方法。为此，从广泛的文献综述中确定了圆形产品设计所需的设计准则作为起点。然后，基于每个圆形设计指南的遵从程度，以及每个圆形设计指南与它所属的特定产品类别的相关性，定义了衡量产品设计改进幅度的标准。最后，该方法已应用于代表127种家用电器的代表性样本，这些127种家用电器属于小型家用电气和电子设备的不同类别。与延长使用寿命和与产品/组件的再利用有关的圆形设计准则已被确定为迫切需要纳入的准则，而与连接器或产品结构有关的准则的紧迫性则适中。