A Conceptual Framework for Regulatory Foresight for Product Technologies of Manufacturing Companies within the Upgrade Circular Economy

With the growing number of environmental regulations affecting manufacturing companies and their product technologies, companies must actively anticipate and track potential changes in regulation. However, anticipating regulations poses the challenge of identifying relevant company- and product-specific legal regulations, as well as assessing their impact and temporal significance. Consequently, relevant product requirements cannot be derived and integrated in the initial development of products and their technologies. Furthermore, existing products cannot be updated according to evolving regulatory requirements during product use, which causes them to become obsolete. As a result, the sustainable transition to the upgrade circular economy (UCE), which focuses on extending product life by adapting to changing environmenta developments, is hindered. Moreover, compliance to environmental regulations cannot be guaranteed. To this end, this paper presents a conceptual framework for regulatory foresight for product technologies of manufacturing companies within the UCE. Therefore, a three-step approach is developed, which outputs a company- and product-specific list of relevant environmental legal regulations and supports the assessment of impacts and the timing of these instruments using the elaborated urgency index.