Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials
This online engineering PDH course provides a comprehensive, data-driven examination of the transition from a linear “take, make, waste” economic model to a circular materials economy, based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2024 strategic framework Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials.
This course explores how redesigning products, extending product lifetimes, and recapturing materials enable significant gains in emissions reduction, resource efficiency, and supply chain resilience. It evaluates key circularity pathways including reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling, and assesses how materials re-enter the economy at their highest possible value.
Moreover, this course examines enabling technologies and systems such as design for circularity, advanced sorting and separation methods, reverse logistics networks, and digital tracking and traceability systems. It also analyzes barriers to implementation including regulatory misalignment, infrastructure limitations, and fragmented material markets. In addition, it evaluates the impacts of circular strategies on embodied carbon, waste generation, material efficiency, and life cycle emissions across multiple product categories.
This course further compares circularity trade-offs across key sectors including batteries, construction materials, critical minerals, plastics, and clean energy technologies such as wind turbine blades, solar photovoltaic modules, electrolyzers, and fuel cells. It also reviews how circular supply chains contribute to material security and reduce dependence on imported critical resources.
This 9 PDH online course is applicable to engineers, sustainability managers, policy makers, as well as other technical professionals interested in learning more about applying circular economy principles to sustainable product design, industrial systems, and material flows.
This PE continuing education course is intended to provide you with the following specific knowledge and skills:
- Understanding fundamentals of product and material circularity, including recirculation pathways, lifetime extension, and material efficiency for emission reduction and decarbonization
- Evaluating engineering and materials principles affecting circularity, including recyclability, durability, disassembly, contamination, and enabling manufacturing processes
- Analyzing circularity performance across key systems such as batteries, construction materials, plastics, composites, and clean energy technologies, and their impacts on carbon, waste, and material flows
- Interpreting life cycle assessment methods and embodied carbon metrics to evaluate environmental impacts across product life cycles
- Examining barriers and enablers of circularity adoption, including policy, markets, infrastructure, and standards
- Assessing circular supply chain strategies, including reverse logistics, sorting, recovery, and digital traceability systems
- Understanding design principles for circular products, including modularity, standardization, and repairability for multiple life cycles
- Evaluating circular business models such as product-as-a-service, take-back systems, and remanufacturing
- Exploring policy and regulatory frameworks supporting circularity, including federal initiatives and embodied carbon disclosure
- Applying quantitative analysis to assess circularity metrics, technoeconomic performance, and integration into decarbonization strategies
In this professional engineering CEU course, you need to review the course document titled, “Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials”, which is based on the U.S. Department of Energy, Publication No. DE-FOA-0003455, “Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials: A Draft Strategic Framework”.
Once you complete your course review, you need to take a multiple-choice quiz consisting of forty-five (45) questions to earn 9 PDH credits. The quiz will be based on the entire document.
Upon successful completion of the quiz, print your Certificate of Completion instantly. (Note: if you are paying by check or money order, you will be able to print it after we receive your payment.) For your convenience, we will also email it to you. Please note that you can log in to your account at any time to access and print your Certificate of Completion.