At modulyss, we strive to bring innovative trends in soft flooring to the market while keeping resource efficiency at the heart of our product design. Our Cradle to Cradle Certified® collections are assessed against five key categories: material health, product circularity, clean air and climate protection, water and soil stewardship, and social fairness. Designing for the future shouldn’t be fleeting, it should become a standard.
What is Circular Economy?
The circular economy minimises waste and maximises resource efficiency by keeping materials in use for as long as possible and recovering or regenerating them at the end of their lifecycle.
Unlike the throwaway culture of the linear economy, it’s designed to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials in closed-loop systems, regenerate nature, and foster collaboration across the supply chain.
Its environmental benefits include waste reduction, lower resource extraction, and enhanced biodiversity, while economic advantages range from cost savings and new business models to improved resilience and quality of life.
Embracing circularity drives innovation, resource equity, and educational shifts, empowering consumers and marginalised groups while ensuring fair resource distribution and adaptation to supply chain disruptions.
Circular Design Principles
The principles of circular design align closely with those of the circular economy:
- Design for Durability
- Design for Disassembly
- Design for Material Efficiency
- Design for Recyclability
- Design for Remanufacture
- Design for Biodegradability
- Design for Circular Business Models (such as products-as-a-service)
- Design for User Engagement
- Design for Digitalisation
- Design for Cultural Change
But how do you know if a product is circular?
One of the ways to check a products’ circularity, is by the certificates the product holds, for example the Cradle to Cradle certification. The Cradle to Cradle Organisation assesses each product in categories such as material health, product circularity, clean air and climate protection, water and soil stewardship, and social fairness. Based on specific criteria, products are certified at different levels: bronze, silver, gold, or platinum.
Green Building Practices
The circular design principles apply to green building practices:
- Selecting recyclable materials or materials with recycled/renewable content
- Energy efficiency and renewable energy
- Water conservation and management
- Passive design strategies
Implementing Circular Design
Applying circular design principles requires more than intention—it involves making informed decisions throughout the design process. Many architectural practices, including Gensler, integrate resource-efficient and circular design principles into their projects. Collaborating with design teams that have experience in these approaches can help incorporate circular considerations from the earliest project stages.
Interested in learning more about circular design principles, emerging trends, innovations and practical examples? Watch the three-part modulyss Talks webinar series featuring Sabine Oberhuber, Lucie Ladigue and Naomi Sakamoto.
Our commitment
At modulyss, resource efficiency is an important consideration throughout our product development process. We aim to design products with their next use in mind, supporting material recovery and reuse at the end of their service life where possible.
The Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute has developed the Cradle to Cradle Certified® Product Standard, a recognised framework for assessing products across five performance categories: material health, product circularity, clean air and climate protection, water and soil stewardship, and social fairness. Aligned with this framework, modulyss offers a range of Cradle to Cradle Full Scope Certified® v4.0 Silver and Gold collections.
Our Cradle to Cradle Full Scope Certified® v4.0 collections feature yarns containing more than 75% recycled content, with selected collections featuring ECONYL® regenerated nylon made from 100% recycled content.
These collections are available on our ecoBACK, comfortBACK ECO and ecoBACK PLUS backings, developed as alternatives to our traditional bitumen-based BACK2BACK backing and designed to support recycling at the end of their service life.
Discover all our Cradle to Cradle Certified® collections.
In addition, we have our Take Back. Give Back. programme, where we collaborate with partners to collect used carpet tiles. Depending on their condition, the collected tiles can be prepared for reuse. Through our high-value recycling process, the yarn is separated from the backing and recycled into new yarn, while the recovered backing material is incorporated into new backing.
Regenerative Cities are Changing How we Design
From Waste to Resource: Why Full-Cycle Design Needs More than Good Intentions
modulyss achieves Cradle to Cradle Certified® Gold under Version 4.0
