Design Solution · Sustainability
Design Solution · Dream about it
Pay for the service not the product so vendors are incentivised to maximise longevity and reuse.
Instead of buying equipment outright, the client pays for the service it provides (e.g. lighting-as-a-service, as at Amsterdam Schiphol) while the manufacturer retains ownership. This shifts incentives toward maximum product longevity and reusability and removes upfront capital, supporting circular outcomes.
Product-as-a-Service flips the ownership model so the manufacturer retains the asset and the client pays for performance — Schiphol's lighting contract is the canonical reference, where Philips stayed liable for lumens delivered rather than units sold. The incentive realignment is the genuine innovation: a vendor who owns the product for life has a direct financial reason to maximise longevity, design for disassembly and take equipment back, which changes procurement outcomes rather than just reporting ones. On the evidence available, this is still largely a claimed model with a small set of landmark pilots; it has not yet propagated across standard commercial fit-outs or public procurement frameworks at scale, and zero evidenced deployments sit on this record. The design team's role is narrow but real — specifying performance standards and service-level agreements rather than product specifications, and ensuring the contract structure is in place before the procurement route closes. The honest risk for a specifier is that the financing structures and residual-value assumptions are immature in many markets, lease terms can outlast tenancies, and the model depends on a sufficiently large and capable vendor base in the asset class being procured.
#circular economy #product as a service #lighting #procurement