Circular Behaviour and Product-Service Systems

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) are purchased quickly and conveniently for a low price, tend to be single use or throwaway and often reach the end-of-life (EOL) in a short time frame. The current FMCG consumption model and associated disposal practices are resource intensive and contribute significantly to landfill and incineration waste streams. In order to reverse this trend, new circular FMCGs are being introduced to the market that require new or revived forms of recycling and reuse. Whilst reuse holds the ability to further increase the utility of materials, studies and applications of recycling continue to be more widespread. Consumers are ultimately responsible for what happens to a product at the EOL and, within these circular scenarios, play a key role in facilitating the continuous flow of resources. Despite requiring a fundamental shift in consumer practices, consumer research is marginal in circular economy (CE) literature. Furthermore, sustainable and circular design is predominantly focussed on sourcing, manufacturing and distribution stages and behaviour is often not fully considered when designing new products and services. Emerging design for behaviour change techniques are often difficult to apply in practice and require further work to move beyond sustainability and incorporate circularity. Therefore, reuse behaviour warrants further study, particularly (1) to model the unique behaviours required for circular FMCG reuse to take place; (2) to understand the barriers and incentives to FMCG reuse behaviour; (3) to translate research into practice through tools for designers to use when developing new concepts; and (4) to reconsider the architecture of circular reuse systems with the aim to facilitate desired consumer behaviours.

Publications
- Tassell, C. and Aurisicchio, M. (2021), A Systems Thinking Framework Integrating Circular Behaviour Research, Product Lifetimes And The Environment (PLATE) conference.
- Tassell, C. and Aurisicchio, M. (2020), The Evolution of Reuse and Recycling Behaviours: An Integrative Review With Application to the Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry, International Society for the Circular Economy (IS4CE) conference.

Outcomes
Description:
1) Classification of circular business models for fast-moving consumer goods highlighting the role of consumers and providers
2) A framework to study circular consumer behaviour
3) Behavioural insights on the reuse of fast-moving consumer goods covering motivation, ability and prompts and a database of additional emergent behavioural influencers and sub-components for these categories
4) Application of the behaviour chains consumer journey mapping approach to actual behaviour and extension of the approach
5) A tool for industry to model and analyse fast-moving consumer good reuse behaviour, designing new products, services and systems based on the outcome