By Kathryn Yap - 12th October, 2026

Designing for the Next Life: Circular Systems from Products to Cities

What changes when reuse, repair, and recovery are considered before something becomes waste?

During New York Climate Week, MIT alumni and guests gathered for Circular by Design: MIT Alumni Shaping the Future of Cities, Materials, Products and Systems, hosted by four MIT alumni club organizations: MIT Alumni EESN, the MIT Club of New York, the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of New York, and MITArchA. The event brought together two conversations on circularity across consumer goods and the built environment. From textiles and footwear to buildings, energy, supply chains, and city-scale reuse, the discussion looked beyond recycling to the systems that help materials remain useful for longer.

Beyond the first use

The first conversation, moderated by Jag Gill, SF ’13, CEO and Founder of Vertru, focused on what it takes to move materials back into use once their first purpose ends.

Textile waste made the scale of the challenge clear. Stwart Peña Feliz, MBA ’23, cited approximately 92 million tons of textile waste globally each year, with less than one percent currently recyclable. Chemical recycling can create another pathway for polyester, but the technical process is only part of the equation. Recovered material also needs enough demand and economic value to support collection and processing at scale.

Footwear makes that coordination problem even more visible. Yuly Fuentes-Medel, MIT Post-Doc 2012, described shoes as products made from many materials and parts, often moving through suppliers and factories shared across brands. Those overlapping material streams make recovery difficult to solve one company at a time.

“No company can do it alone.” — Yuly Fuentes-Medel

Material recovery also has a human dimension. Brigid Abraham, Director of Materials Research and Sustainable Practice at Grace Farms Foundation, brought attention to the labor behind sourcing, processing, and manufacturing. Recycled materials can still pass through supply chains connected to forced or child labor, making social conditions part of the circularity question alongside environmental performance.

“Just because you automatically think, ‘Oh, it’s 40% recycled, we’re good to go,’ that’s not necessarily the case.” — Brigid Abraham

Working with what is already there

The second conversation, moderated by Melissa Marsh, MArch ’04, Founder and Executive Director of PLASTARC, shifted those questions into buildings, operations, manufacturing, and cities. Marsh framed circularity as “designing with the end and the future in mind,” considering what materials and systems might become next from the beginning rather than waiting until they reach the end of their current use.

Reuse can mean finding another role for a material rather than preserving its original function. Olivia Huang, MArch ’18, described a 1920s Cornell dormitory where solid maple doors that could no longer meet code requirements were reused as interior wall paneling, while retained hardware created places for students to hang bags and jackets. The material stayed in use, but in a different form.

At a larger scale, Huang suggested market research into existing reuse networks, pointing to structural steel circulating through informal online marketplaces. The material may already exist and have another useful life, but designers and owners may not know where it is, how much is available, or what it is worth early enough to plan around it.

“My definition of circularity is about continuity of care.” — Olivia Huang

That question of visibility also applies to building performance. Elaine Wang, MCP ’23, described how smart-meter data at 15-minute intervals helped identify unusually high energy use at a multifamily property and narrow the issue to cooling and humidity problems associated with two mechanical units. More timely information made a more targeted response possible.

“Making the consumption more visible… creating that feedback loop is kind of prompting action.” — Elaine Wang

At the city scale, Oliver Sellers-Garcia, MCP ’06, focused on what has to exist around reuse for it to work at scale. Boston’s building-material reuse study looks at what materials are already present, what value they may hold, and what markets could receive them. Reuse, in this view, depends not only on requirements but on information, buyers, and a functioning secondary market.

Manufacturing offered another version of the same idea. Sunitha Ray, SM ’19, framed circularity around reuse, repair, recovery, and reverse logistics. In one example involving roughly 8,000 vendors, changing ordering frequency reduced transportation costs and emissions by about 40 percent. The intervention did not require replacing the system, but changing how the existing network operated.

Designing with the future in mind

Circularity depends on seeing what already exists, how it is performing, and what it could become next. Similar questions have surfaced in PLASTARC’s work with Matter Surfaces, from rethinking circularity and complexity in material sourcing to considering how architectural entrances perform for the people using them. In each case, better decisions depend on bringing material, performance, and human factors into view early enough to shape what happens next.