Project

Relab makes product disassembly data easier to collect and reuse. These pages cover the research framing, current priorities, and the path from live records to curated dataset releases.

Why Relab exists

Circular-economy and industrial-ecology research depends on detailed product data: what things are made of, how they come apart, and what evidence backs those claims. Without it, life-cycle assessment and material flow analysis cannot quantify environmental impacts, identify recovery pathways, or inform circular design. That data is scarce, mostly closed, and slow to produce. Producers tend to hold it as proprietary, and small expert teams sampling products by hand cannot keep pace with everything entering the market. The Global LCA Data Access network hosted roughly 130,000 process datasets as of 2024, against millions of consumer products on the market.

Relab works downstream instead, with the people who already open products: repairers, refurbishers, dismantlers, recyclers. They meet products at the point of failure, which shows as-failed composition, wear, and recoverability that as-designed specifications never record. Low-barrier tools turn that routine work into structured, openly licensed observations.

Some of that work is already recorded. Under the Open Repair Data Standard, repair groups have logged more than 400,000 repair records covering product category, brand, age, fault, and outcome. Those records are event-level: they carry no component hierarchies, no masses, no geometry. Relab’s contribution is that missing depth, at the component level, together with standardized imagery.

The exchange is meant to run both ways. A circular economy for products needs a circular data economy alongside it, one that feeds middle- and end-of-life observations back into the data infrastructure that research and design draw on. Closing that loop means returning value to contributors: composition insight and sustainability metrics delivered back to the people who record the products. That return is a design goal, not a shipped feature, and whether it sustains contribution is untested.

What has been demonstrated

A pilot evaluated the platform on 78 small durable consumer products: 46 documented in a controlled laboratory, and 32 at two workshops by 135 participants, mostly LCA practitioners and researchers. It produced 1,331 component records and 3,610 images. Laboratory records were substantially deeper than workshop ones, which were structured but shallower.

These are pilot figures, not the size of the live dataset; see Dataset for what is in the app today. Two limits: deployment with repair, dismantling, and recycling practitioners is untested future work, and interoperability across taxonomies and external tools is a design goal, not demonstrated functionality.

Where to go next

Use cases says what Relab is and is not for, if you are deciding whether it fits your work. The 9R framework is background: the ten circularity strategies, R0 to R9, that the project takes its cue from; the platform does not apply them to records. Dataset covers how to browse current records and how curated releases differ from the live app. Roadmap tracks current priorities, with GitHub issues as the live work list.