In industry, designing and developing a product is only the first step in a long and complex journey: its life cycle. To reduce its environmental footprint, improve economic efficiency, and meet societal expectations, it is essential to understand the different phases and act on every available lever.
1. The Product Life Cycle: The 4 Key Stages
An industrial product goes through four major stages:
- Manufacturing:
This phase includes raw material extraction, processing, assembly, and the energy required for production. This is where a large part of the environmental impacts occurs. - Distribution:
This stage covers packaging, storage, logistics, and transportation. Optimizing flows and reducing packaging are major challenges. - Use:
The product is used by the consumer or the company. Its lifespan depends on its robustness, maintenance, availability of spare parts, and repairability. But this is often the most energy-consuming phase, hence the need to design low-energy products.
End of life:
When the product reaches the end of its use, several routes are possible:
– Repair, to extend usage time
– Reuse, giving it a second life
– Refurbishment, to put it back on the market after upgrading
– Recycling, to reintegrate materials into a new production cycle
– Disposal, as a last resort
2. Circular Economy: A New Model for a Sustainable Life Cycle
Unlike the linear “extract – produce – consume – discard” model, the circular economy aims to close the loop and minimize the loss of value. It relies on 3 axes and 7 pillars of action.
Axis 1 – The Supply Side (Industry and Economic Actors)
Industry stands at the forefront of rethinking production methods and limiting the environmental impact of goods placed on the market. This axis includes four key pillars:
- Sustainable sourcing:
This consists in selecting more responsible raw materials: recycled materials, renewable fibers, local resources, or committed suppliers. The goal is to reduce impacts from the outset by choosing controlled, traceable sources that rely less on finite resources. - Eco-design:
Eco-design integrates environmental considerations from the earliest stages of product development. It involves creating products that are more durable, resource-efficient, easier to repair and dismantle, or more compact to reduce packaging and transportation. Every technical choice is evaluated based on its impact throughout the entire life cycle. - Industrial and territorial symbiosis:
This pillar is based on cooperation between companies within the same region. The waste or by-products of one company can become the resources of another — the principle of industrial symbiosis. Pooling energy, optimizing flows, and sharing infrastructure help create ecosystems that reduce both costs and impacts. - Functional economy:
This model shifts the paradigm: users no longer buy a product, they buy a service. Rental, subscription, equipment sharing… This pushes companies to design durable, repairable, optimized products, since they remain the owners and maintain them.
Axis 2 – Consumer Demand and Behavior
This axis focuses on how products are chosen and used, with two complementary pillars:
- Responsible consumption:
Encourages more informed purchases: choosing durable, repairable, refurbished, or reused products. It also includes collaborative consumption (sharing, peer-to-peer rental, pooling), which limits the need to manufacture new items while meeting the same needs. - Extending product lifespan:
Repair rather than replace — that is the essence of this pillar. It promotes reuse, repair, refurbishment, and the availability of spare parts. The longer a product lasts, the more its initial manufacturing impact is “amortized” for the environment. Refurbishment sectors play a key role by giving objects a second life.
Axis 3 – Waste Management
This last axis concerns what happens when a product can no longer be used as intended.
- Recycling:
Recycling transforms waste into new raw materials, reducing the extraction of virgin resources. For high-quality recycling, products must be well designed (easy to disassemble, mono-material, correctly labeled), supported by efficient recycling chains and user awareness. High-quality recycling can effectively close the loop and reinject materials into new industrial cycles.
3. Acting for a More Sustainable Product Life Cycle: Indicators and Continuous Improvement
For a circular economy strategy to be truly effective, it must be guided by measurable indicators and a continuous improvement plan. Key criteria include:
- Percentage of recycled and recyclable materials in the product
- Share of CSR-committed suppliers
- Geographic distribution of sourcing
- CO₂ emissions at each life cycle stage
- Actual lifespan, repairability rate, and service rate
- Availability and lead times of spare parts
- Energy consumption during manufacturing and use
- Quantity and type of packaging
- Product durability and repairability rates
- End-of-life recovery or recycling rate
- Rates of reuse, repurposing, and refurbishment
Implementing a continuous improvement plan (PDCA cycle, regular reviews, measurable objectives, actions by pillar…) helps track progress, identify barriers, and implement concrete solutions.
Conclusion
In a context of environmental constraints and increasing pressure on resources, the circular economy provides an essential lever to make product life cycles more sustainable. By acting on each pillar — from eco-design to recycling, including responsible consumption — industries can reduce their impact, create new economic opportunities, and meet growing consumer expectations.
The future of industry will undeniably depend on its ability to design better, help people consume better, and recycle better.
Our Commitment: A Structured and Tangible CSR and Circular Approach
Since 2021, we have initiated a company-wide CSR approach that enabled us to reach Ecovadis Platinum level in 2024, the highest distinction. This internal momentum naturally extended into a profound transformation of our product design and monitoring, in line with circular economy principles.
For several years, we have integrated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into our projects and deployed the indicators mentioned above to measure the sustainable performance of our scanners. Each new development follows an improvement plan including:
- Material optimization
- Reduction and improvement of packaging
- Logistics optimization
- Selection of responsible suppliers
- And, more broadly, work on every aspect of the product life cycle
Today, we can confidently say that our products are extremely stable over time, with proven durability and repairability. We offer multi-year warranties and ensure the repair of 100% of failures, demonstrating full control over the long life of our equipment.
Always pioneers in implementing standards and indicators, we calculated our durability index, which is usually reserved for consumer goods. The result is remarkable: 9/10 for our Quartz series dedicated to cultural heritage digitization.
A powerful demonstration that durability, innovation, and performance can truly go hand in hand.