Alberto Rogato and Eleonora Fiore
The growing consumption of electronic products is leading to a rapid and alarming rise of e-waste. Within this context, circular economy strategies have progressively shifted attention from end-of-life recovery towards product lifetime extension, highlighting repair as a fundamental practice to enable multiple strategies. However, repair cannot be confined to a mere technical operation, as it serves as a broader circular strategy able to operate across products, services, value chains, organisational ecosystems, and socio-technical infrastructures.
This paper investigates how EU-funded projects address consumer electronics and WEEE through repair-oriented circular strategies, and at which levels of design intervention these strategies operate. Drawing on literature from circular economy, design evolution, and forms of repair, the research develops a four-level analytical framework of intervention: product-service, business and process model, social and organisational ecosystem, and socio-technical and institutional infrastructure. The framework is applied to a systematic mapping of projects retrieved from the CORDIS platform for EU-funded research and innovation projects. The results show that repair-oriented strategies are mainly articulated through product-service interventions, business and process models, and socio-technical and institutional infrastructures. Product-service interventions emerge through durability, repairability, disassembly, reuse and component recovery, while business and process model innovation is visible through reverse logistics, remanufacturing, value recovery and spare-parts recovery. Socio-technical and institutional infrastructure appears mainly through digital and informational systems, including lifecycle data, digital product passports and value-chain coordination. By contrast, social and organisational forms of repair, including community-led initiatives and independent repair networks, appear less represented. The paper argues that repair becomes systemic when technical, service, organisational and infrastructural dimensions are connected, while also showing that such systemic articulation remains uneven within the project corpus analysed.
Keywords: circular economy; systemic design; repair strategies; product lifetime extension