Desenvolvimento de sistemas circulares sustentáveis para os plásticos

The CircSys project aims to develop and demonstrate innovative streamlined LCSA decision-support tools for designing sustainable circular systems at early design stages, considering the anticipatory nature of the assessment (before a detailed design exists), uncertainties, and complex nonlinear interactions between different specification parameters, aiming to support design specification with less data and effort. We expect that these tools will be able to provide, within a reasonable time and effort, similar results to those that very exhaustive and time-consuming LCSAs would reach. Thus, the specific objectives of the project are: 1) To improve the state-of-the-art methods to streamline the LCSA of a system; in particular, the project results will guide decision-makers considering sustainability and the CE perspective in the design of products and systems; 2) To improve the current circularity approaches by contributing to solving the technical and scientific challenges to advance in the implementation of a novel LCSA methodology to assess CE strategies; 3) To develop new MCDA methods yielding indicators offering a thorough analysis of LCSA and circularity results, including non-compensatory aspects employing new methods based on absolute merit; 4) To create and test an interactive methodology that integrates LCSA, MCDA, and optimization to guide decision-makers in progressively specifying a design, taking into account multiple impacts and indicators; this will be based on the novel idea of using optimization methods to determine which design variables are more important to specify to streamline the process. Even though the project applications will focus on plastics, these methodological advances will be equally applicable to other types of product systems.