Requirements of Circular Economy on Photonic Products

The EU Horizon-2020 project C-SERVEES investigates improvements of circular economy (CE) business models in the electronics sector. CE aims at decoupling (raw) material intake and (electronics) waste generation from revenue and growth. It has severe implications on the related product design. In particular, the aspects of maximum re-use have to be considered in the initial product design phase. For certain classes of photonic products in the B2B area, this is contradicted by certain technical and operational aspects. This severely limits re-use, one of the key concepts of CE. Based on a new system for OTDR-like monitoring of fiber infrastructures, we will show that in particular very long product lifetime also limits certain CE concepts in their efficiency. This must be considered in the related business models.