Design for Recycling is a fundamental prerequisite for a functioning circular economy and, accordingly, forms a cornerstone of the EU Circular Economy Action Plan. Yet product development often lacks transparency on how specific design choices affect the recyclability of a product at the end of its useful life. By assessing the material complexity of a product, the Statistical Entropy Analysis (SEA) can indirectly quantify the recyclability of a product using only little information. This publication firstly analyses the SEA in depth to identify its key limitations and secondly develops it further. The comparative relative product-inherent recyclability (cRPR) value is introduced, which firstly enables quantified comparisons of different designs within a product category. Secondly, cRPR is based on the combination of SEA and the apparent recycling boundary, which allows for the recycled material value to be taken into account. This enables an analytical assessment of the degree of complexity up to which a product can be recycled from an economic perspective. The applicability of the cRPR assessment is demonstrated on the case study of the window system of an automotive vehicle door. It is shown that the enhanced recyclability assessment based on the SEA delivers accurate, objective and comparative recyclability metrics and offers a clearer picture of the true end-of-life performance of a product.
Hansen et al. (2026) studied this question.