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Circular Economy

Here’s what embedding circularity looks like at Cisco

September 24, 2020

When Cisco started embedding circular economy practices into its work several years ago, it worked on building proof of concepts first. For other companies looking to embark on a similar journey, Scott Scheeler, vice president of engineering at the company, advises that they start small and build from there.

“Don’t start where we are now. We started several years ago and we started small,” Scheeler said.

One of the projects Cisco is currently working on is extending the life cycle of some of its products by making them modular, enabling customers to replace parts of a product after a couple years instead of buying a brand new one.

“We’ve always kind of designed our products to have a long life cycle,” Scheeler said. “But what’s different now is we’re thinking about it as it may end up going to more than one customer. … Now we’re talking about products that may last in the field for five, 10, even 15 years.”

Deonna Anderson, associate editor at GreenBiz Group, interviewed Scott Scheeler, vice president of engineering at Cisco, during Circularity 20, which took place August 25-27, 2020. View archived videos from the conference here.