CIWM and URGE Collective launch circular design sprint to tackle industrial waste

The Design Skills for Embedding Circularity pilot programme is launching an intensive six-week design sprint to address complex, real-world end-of-life product challenges. Funded by the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) and delivered alongside the Design Council, WRAP, and URGE Collective, the initiative pairs professional designers, design engineers, and researchers directly with waste management giant Biffa and major retailer Decathlon.

The sprint—running throughout June and July—follows a rigorous four-month preparatory phase led by circular economy expert Sophie Thomas. During this period, the design cohort toured industrial waste and sorting facilities across the UK operated by Sherbourne Recycling, SUEZ, DS Smith, and SWEEEP, as well as Decathlon’s headquarters and Allermuir’s furniture remanufacturing hub.

The site visits exposed critical systemic barriers to recycling, including massive material loss driven by overly complex component design, and the severe operational hazards caused by single-use vapes and lithium-ion batteries entering standard municipal recycling streams.

Four Live Systemic Challenges

Facilitated by Tara Hanrahan, the upcoming sprint will force designers to develop practical, scalable concepts to eliminate industry greenwashing in favor of authentic, measurable sustainability. The teams will focus on four live briefs:

• Vape Interception: Creating targeted intervention strategies to prevent single-use electronic vapes from entering household waste streams.

• Easy Disassembly: Designing innovative concepts that allow small consumer electronics to be quickly and efficiently taken apart for component recovery.

• Festival Waste Reduction: Formulating product and system designs to eliminate the massive volume of abandoned tents at music festivals.

• Reusable Packaging: Developing scalable, closed-loop reusable packaging systems tailored for retail buy-back and trade-in programmes.

Bridging the Upstream-Downstream Divide

The programme is designed to fundamentally change how products are conceived by breaking down the traditional silos between manufacturing and waste management.

“The designers have been exposed to the sheer complexity of opportunities and barriers to circularity, and are better informed about the design choices they can make to design out waste and design in circularity.” — Alexie Sommer, Co-director of the programme

“A vital element for progress is cross-sector collaboration and expertise – designers who understand what happens to a product at end of life, and resources and waste professionals who can influence design thinking upstream.” — Dan Cooke, Director of Policy, Communications and External Affairs at CIWM

With growing global interest in the pilot from Europe to Australia, the findings, prototypes, and systemic insights generated during the summer sprint will be shared publicly during a dedicated exhibition and symposium scheduled for autumn.