Industrial Design and the Circular Economy: Investigating Design-for-Disassembly Practices in Nigerian Electronics Manufacturing

Electronic waste is one of Nigeria's fastest-growing environmental challenges, with Lagos and Kano serving as major collection points for both domestically generated and illegally imported end-of-life electronics. Design for disassembly, a circular economy strategy enabling efficient product end-of-life material recovery, remains virtually unimplemented in the Nigerian electronics manufacturing sector. This study investigates the awareness, adoption barriers, and enabling conditions for design-for-disassembly practices among electronics manufacturers operating in Lagos, Ogun, and Kano states. A mixed-methods design combines a structured survey of product designers and engineers in twenty-eight electronics manufacturing and assembly enterprises, in-depth interviews with fourteen design and sustainability managers, and disassembly time and material recovery assessments of products from six sampled companies. Findings reveal near-universal absence of formal design-for-disassembly protocols, with the majority of design decisions driven exclusively by assembly efficiency and unit cost reduction. None of the sampled companies maintains documented end-of-life design specifications. The study identifies five systemic barriers to adoption: absence of extended producer responsibility regulation, lack of domestic material recovery infrastructure, short product development cycle times, limited designer awareness of circular design principles, and absence of market incentives for recyclable product design. A Design-for-Disassembly Implementation Roadmap is developed, specifying regulatory, market, and capacity-building interventions required to shift industry practice. Recommendations include extended producer responsibility legislation under the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency and circular design integration in engineering and design education curricula. Keywords: circular economy, design for disassembly, electronic waste, Nigeria, sustainable design.