Businesses are encouraged to factor environmental impact in their operations to adhere to a circular economy principle.

Altum co-founder Carlo Delantar underscored the importance of employing circular design and strategy in their business operations focusing on the circular economy.

“So circular design is really designing our products, services, and systems for the circular economy. And in order to do that, we need to zoom in on the user’s needs and zoom out to a systems perspective and always it is about intention,” he said in a webinar.

Delantar said circular design involves safe and circular material choices, dematerialization, formats choices, product life extension, from product to service, modularity, embedding intelligence, designing for inner loops, and designing for leaky nutritious loops.

“…Can we do other types of materials that aren’t harmful to the environment with so many other concepts and materials that have (been) developed right now just to adhere to the circular economy and so on and so forth?,” he said.

Altum is a sustainable manufacturer of furniture and interiors which are built on circular economy principles.

Delantar cited as examples of redesigning formats and shapes, product service systems, and innovating materials.

He said that with an automatic water machine for instance, water comes out for every one peso coin inserted in the machine.

“With this, you are actually reducing the amount of plastic, the amount of packaging, (and) you are centralizing the delivery system. You used to bring your own bottle, you used to bring your own container,” he added.

Delantar said businesses can design everything for the circular economy.

“And this is really just talking about we are the cause and the solution for anything we do on the planet and it really starts with us,” he added.