Volume 13, Number 2

ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS

DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING RESEARCH

MOHSEN SHAHINPOOR

Editor-In-Chief

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Design for reuse, remanufacture and recycling; an alternative to Design for Landfill

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By: Pr Dominique MILLET, Mechanical System Design Dpt, SUPMECA , Pr Daniel BRISSAUD, G-SCOP Laboratory, University of Grenoble , Dr Gwenola BERTOLUCI, ENSIA Laboratory CEPAL , Dr Peggy ZWOLINSKI, G-SCOP Laboratory, University of Grenoble

Increasing the reuse of products, components and materials is the major challenge to limit waste landfill. Even if the ecological benefits have not been quantified and proved so far, the many successful examples developed by companies in the world let think that it could be generalised when special economic, social and environmental conditions and directives are met. Following this vision, it is assumed that the modes of consumption and production should both deeply move in a near future to define a more sustainable and affordable way of living. Alongside many other facets, the engineering of new products and new production systems should be studied to accompany the transformation and help make adapted decisions. At the beginning of 2006, Mohsen Shahinpoor accepted to give us the responsibility to organize a special issue of the International Journal of Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacture on this topic. It was entitled: Design for reuse, remanufacture and recycling; an alternative to Design for Landfill. We are yet very pleased to introduce this special issue containing seven articles on recent developments contributing to the field of design for environment. Those papers investigate some conditions to make strategies of reuse, remanufacturing and recycling successful, profitable and efficient and bring methods and tools to support their developments and implementations.

The first article “Sustainable products: necessity for an overall design approach” gives an overview of the questions raised by improving environmental objectives, essentially product end-of-life value in company practices. Zwolinski P., Brissaud D., Llerena D. and Millet D., in a project funded by French Research Ministry, focus on the three main drivers of this strategy: the global trajectory that a firm should develop to integrate environment, the real behaviour of consumers against remanufactured products and the engineering tools assisting designers to incorporate recovery strategies in their practices.

The second paper proposes a computer system (Life Cycle Simulation System) that simulates product life cycles dynamically and assesses them from various aspects including environmental aspect, maintenance or costs. A feature of the system is its “pluggable mechanism” by which an additional module for simulation is inserted into the system when necessary. As Sakao T. and Shimomura Y. say, this allows users to carry out various assessments efficiently depending on their purposes. The interest of such LCSL is demonstrated with a complete example concerning a refrigerator whose various end of life scenarios are analysed.

The third article focuses on the reuse aspect, because the reuse of components, subassemblies or entire products is a more efficient end of life strategy than material recovery, recycling or disposal. But Ibbotson S., Kara S. and Kaebernick H. remind that there is no methodology to decide which parameters need to be redesigned in order to change the life of a selected component to a desired level. In their paper a methodology to determine the extended design life of a component is presented, based on design parameters and failure analysis. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated on the electric motors choice problem. The results suggest that this methodology can aid designers in estimating the design life and the associated design parameters with great accuracy.

In the following article Bohr P., Herrmann C. and Luger T. speak about extended producer responsibility constraints for electronics manufacturers. They suggest that a virtual feedback loop which is embedded in a regulation approach based on tradable certificates can create an incentive to green design. They propose an engineering software tool (Prodtect) which helps designers to address design properties, material composition, and other relevant end-of-life characteristics based on a virtual product model. The benefits of such a tool are demonstrated with a simple example.

The fifth paper addresses the environmental impact of remanufacturing. For the authors (King A., Rowe A. and Bufton D.) remanufacturing has been traditionally driven by economic demand within certain niche markets and it is now being considered as a strategy for many other end-of-use products. In order to obtain a widespread application of design for remanufacturing, the authors suggest the necessity of demonstrating the environmental benefits of such a strategy (reduction of waste, lower need of virgin material and reduction of energy to be consumed). They take the example of the Xerox remanufacturing process for a fuser roll component and use a Life Cycle Assessment (Eco-it tool) tool to compare the material, energy and waste generated by new build and remanufacture. The results of the study show a significant environmental benefit of the remanufacturing of the fuser rolls.

The following article focuses on the recycling process and more particularly on plastic recycling from the automotive sector. The objective is to understand the most important parameters that enable a long lasting recycling network implementation. To do so, Maudet C., Bertoluci G. and Froelich D. construct a dynamic flow model of the chain with the help of the Witness software. The results show the major role played by the changes of the price of oil, the necessity for recycling companies to have a flow of quality input sufficient to saturate their production systems and achieve profitable sales and the lack of cooperation between the actors of the chain. The used dynamic flow model has proved to be an effective way of creating a multi-participative area in which exchanges occurred allowing all the parties involved to understand the aims and requirements of the other stakeholders and the impact of their own actions.

The last article deals with the regional perspective of the reuse concept: the recycling process of a non ferrous metal (aluminium) in a specific country ( Fiji , a small island developing state in the Pacific). These specificities allow to show the large variability of solutions due to the great diversity of situations (recycling of light weight and low volume scrap aluminium…). Also, Kumar S., Mathieux F., Onwubolu G. and Chandra V. suggest the solution of a powder metallurgy-based process for the recycling of aluminium in Fiji . This solution presents several advantages: waste reduction, recycling at source, higher flexibility for production, etc. The properties of the recycled parts make them competitive with raw materials for some low technological applications.