The application of the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) has been an establishedpractice in systems engineering and engineering design for some decades. The benefit ofapplying FMEA is to raise engineers’ awareness of potential risks related to a specific designconfiguration so that corrective actions can be preventively prioritized to avoid potential failureto happen. The work presented in this paper originates from the established practices of usingFMEA and FMEA Boundary Diagrams in product development and extends the scope ofanalysis by integrating circularity considerations early on in the design process. Based on suchrationale, the paper presents the first stage of the development of an approach named CircularityImpact and Failure Analysis (CIFA) aiming to become an integral part of a design for circularitystrategy. The objective of the approach is to raise engineers‘ awareness about potentialcircularity issues in early design so that they can act accordingly to create more circularsolutions. The paper presents the first results of the prescriptive work toward the developmentof CIFA, limiting the circularity considerations to the integration of obsolescence andrecyclability considerations in the FMEA. The paper presents the logic and the rationale of theapproach and exemplifies the application of the approach to the case of a bicycle V-brake.