Cisco is “making good progress” on its goal to incorporate circular design principles into all of its new products by 2025, Cisco’s director of circular economy Katie Schindall told SDxCentral.

Circular design addresses scope 3 emissions that result from a company’s supply chain, waste, and customer use of its products. Scope 3 emissions are often the most difficult to regulate, but redesigning the lifecycle of products while keeping lowered emissions in mind is one way to assert more control over this classification of emissions. 

“The design decisions that we make around products and packaging are going to influence the greenhouse gas emissions and wastes from our manufacturing suppliers and partners,” Schindall said.

Cisco’s product designers use a gamified scoring system in early design stages to map out a potential product’s lifecycle and environmental impact. This scoring system considers five key areas: material use, standardization, packaging, energy consumption, and product end-of-life.

“Going forward, we'll have [those principles] embedded into our standard design processes,” Schindall said. Cisco wants all newly designed products to meet those five circular design standards by 2025. “We have really good support from across the design community,” she added.

Determining how to reduce waste and pollution from the start is the core of environmental sustainability, Schindall explained. When designing products with circularity as a priority, “we’re able to reduce that footprint before it even becomes a footprint, which of course is the most beneficial.”

Tae Yoo, Cisco’s SVP of corporate affairs, echoed Schindall’s preventative mindset during a Goldman Sachs conference call last month. Cisco isn’t actively purchasing carbon offsets, but using preemptive emissions reductions strategies instead, Yoo said. 

Cisco’s Product Takeback and Reuse program plays a large role in its circular design strategy. Customers can return end-of-life products at no additional cost, and Cisco then reuses or recycles 99.8% of returned products. 

However, a lack of customer awareness presents a barrier to elevated efficiency of reuse and recycling programs, according to Schindall. Once customers understand these programs are available, “they’re really excited about it,” Schindall said, reflecting high customer demand for circularity within the products they buy.

A circular economy isn’t just planet-friendly. It’s also a trillion-dollar market opportunity. According to research from Accenture, this model could create $4.5 trillion in economic growth by 2030, and it has the potential to reach $25 trillion by 2050. 

Considering the economic and environmental benefits of a circular economy, it’s easy to see why this model is gaining traction. And the need for transforming consumption is vast ‒‒ humanity currently consumes 1.75 times more resources each year than the Earth can naturally regenerate — a number that is on course to more than double by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum. 

Schindall recognized that a circular economy, wherein waste is designed out of the process and materials are reused, presents a viable route for a sustainable future.

“Waste is just excess material in the wrong person's hands,” she said. As Cisco’s circular economy develops, Schindall said the company will continue to consider how it can “move [waste] to somewhere it has a value and think about how we design in the first place so that it’s easier to make that a reality.”