From Design To Impact: Circular Design Across Cisco’s Product Life Cycle

The following is an excerpt from our FY24 Purpose Report, celebrating 40 years of impact at Cisco. Data and metrics are reflective of Cisco’s fiscal year 2024, ending on July 31, 2024.

Circular design means designing products, packaging, and systems that enable reuse, minimize environmental impacts, drive innovation, and realize value for our stakeholders. We design our products and packaging with circularity in mind, aligning them to 25 Circular Design Principles organized across five focus areas.

We developed a circular design evaluation methodology and web-based tool to help us track progress toward our circular design goal. Every new product and packaging design must be scored in the evaluation tool and achieve a score of at least 75% before its release to production. A score of 75% or higher represents substantial incorporation of our Circular Design Principles into our new products and packaging and counts toward our circular design goal. We formalized processes and dashboards to support and enforce the mandatory scoring requirement, resulting in all new designs released in fiscal 2024 being evaluated in the tool.

Cisco’s products are designed to convey our brand of quality and innovation. In fiscal 2024, Cisco updated the industrial design guidelines to incorporate brand requirements and Circular Design Principles, including guidelines such as avoiding the usage of solely cosmetic and nonfunctional plastic parts and optimizing the product packaging. In fiscal 2025, we will review the Circular Design Principles, methodology, and tool based on key learnings, stakeholder feedback, and external requirements, to identify opportunities to further our efforts.

Pinnacle Awards

A cross-functional team from Supply Chain and Engineering won the Sustainability Impact Award at the 2024 Cisco Pinnacle Awards, the highest recognition of product and engineering innovation at Cisco, for helping transform our company strategy and meaningfully accelerating Cisco and our customers toward key environmental sustainability goals.

Assessing Our Products’ Environmental Impacts

A life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to model the environmental impacts of a product across multiple impact categories over the product life cycle, from cradle to grave. We use LCAs to quantify key environmental impacts of our products, identify hot spots for continuous product design and operational improvement, and opportunities to reduce resources used throughout our supply chain.

In fiscal 2024, to address the need for LCAs across our product portfolio, we developed a scalable LCA model including environmental impact reports aligned to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14040/44 standards. The intent of this model is to improve the quality and decrease the resource-intensiveness of performing LCAs. It can be used for most Cisco hardware products to address internal and external stakeholder interest. With the large number of products in our portfolio, we started by using this model for representative products across Cisco product families. In fiscal 2024, we published our first LCA report using the scalable LCA model.

Read the full FY24 Purpose Report

To learn more about the progress we’re making to Power an Inclusive Future for All, visit our Cisco Purpose Reporting Hub.

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