'Product recyclability is decided at the design stage — costs and technology must be assessed together'

KEI proposes a Korean ecodesign assessment framework, urging policymakers to weigh environmental benefits alongside costs

Researchers call for linking existing domestic rating systems and data to set product-specific design standards

A product's circularity — its lifespan, repairability and recyclability — is largely determined at the design stage. A new report argues that raising circularity requires a comprehensive assessment that goes beyond environmental impact to include costs and technical feasibility.

The Korea Environment Institute published the finding in a KEI Focus report titled "How Should We Measure Product Circularity? An Assessment of Ecodesign Through the EU's MEErP." The report analyzes the EU's methodology for evaluating the environmental performance of products and recommends that South Korea build a framework capable of assessing both environmental impact and economic viability in an integrated way.

The EU has been expanding its ecodesign regime beyond energy efficiency to encompass durability, repairability and recyclability, and has been refining the methodology used to evaluate those qualities.

Central to that effort are MEErP — the Methodology for Ecodesign of Energy-related Products, which analyzes a product's environmental impact and the cost of improvements — and its companion assessment tool, EcoReport.

In 2024, the EU revised its assessment approach to allow more comprehensive and integrated calculations of the benefits of using recycled materials and of extending product lifespans through repair and upgrades.

For example, keeping a product in use longer reduces the environmental burden of manufacturing a replacement, but it can also delay the adoption of a newer, more energy-efficient model. The EU updated its methodology to weigh such trade-offs alongside repair and maintenance costs.

South Korea already operates several separate systems that touch on these issues: a circularity assessment that evaluates how easily a product can be recycled, an environmental product declaration scheme that measures overall environmental impact, and an energy efficiency rating system.

Because each system is managed independently, they fall short of providing a comprehensive picture of the environmental benefits and consumer costs that flow from improvements in product design.

Rather than creating an entirely new regime, KEI recommends building a Korean integrated assessment framework by linking existing systems and the data they generate.

Using the existing circularity assessment to quantify recyclability in numerical terms and combining that with data on environmental impact and costs, policymakers could determine what level of improvement is appropriate for each product category.

To that end, the research team proposed a phased approach: first, consolidating existing systems and data; second, piloting the assessment methodology on select product groups; and third, incorporating the results into product design standards.

"South Korea has systems and data for evaluating product recyclability and environmental impact, but they are not sufficiently connected to one another," said Park Ji-hwan, an associate research fellow at KEI. "It is important to link the existing systems, refine the assessment methods, and establish rational design standards for each product category."

thlee@heraldcorp.com