Characteristics of sustainable products

One of the key challenges that the global industrial system is called to face in the twenty-first century is the increasing pressure to adopt a more sustainable approach to both product design and manufacturing. This is also influenced by the growing number, diversity, and complexity of products and related functions, and by innovation leading to creating new types of products to best meet consumers’ demands and expectations. Circular economy (CE) can make a relevant contribution in this regard, by making innovation-based production more holistically sustainable, using the approach of slowing and closing the resource loops. CE and sustainability are intricately connected and feed off each other and, in fact, it is this interaction leading to the manufacturing of sustainable products that this chapter wants to explore with a focus on the Italian and Polish strategies in this area, in line with the overall objective of the book project that this chapter is a part of. After an in-depth analysis of the state of the art on the CE and its key features, the chapter includes a section in which the authors explored and highlighted the ways CE measures can contribute to making product manufacturing more sustainable. At the end, in the second part of this chapter, CE strategies for sustainable product manufacturing are explored at the European level with a focus on those implemented by Poland and Italy.