Journal of Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing reduces final wastes to sinks, extraction of virgin materials and pollution from production processes by reinstating products taken back by end-users to satisfy part of overall demand. Product returns are delayed and possibly limited in periods of fast growth and excessive in the aftermath. Varying growth/demand and volatile take back by consumers and industrial end-users introduce uncertainty, regarding quantity and quality of returns. As remanufacturing expands, escalating competition for acquisition of high quality returns exacerbates uncertainty. Production planning and control for efficient remanufacturing depends on reliable prediction of quantity and quality of returns. A method is developed for prognosis of product return quantity and quality grades, as reflected by vintage flows. It is anchored on a law relating stock and end-of-life level, under random losses and arbitrary end-of-life distribution. Efficacy is tested via a model that describes stock and flows in reuse/remanufacturing, allowing for varying demand, random stock losses, random product returns with time-varying distributions and time-varying utilisation of product returns. Realisations are obtained by Marko-chain Monte-Carlo simulation. Inherently integral in nature, using scaled data and founded on rigorous balances, the method enables prognosis of returns and age-vintage flows, under realistic conditions, including unknown nonlinearities and non-stationarities. It features improved performance (mean absolute error less than one half) compared to leading methods in-use that employ black-box models with error-driven parameter adaptation (e.g. regression). Efficacy is particularly high at crucial peaks and lows (shortage or surplus periods) enabling resourceful planning of acquisition and inventory control of product returns towards sustainability.

Remanufacturing is a process of recovering used products to a like-new condition. It can potentially achieve considerable economic, environmental and social benefits in many applications. However, its economic benefit varies for different products and remanufacturing processes. This research aims to develop a framework and cost model to quantitatively evaluate the benefits of remanufacturing techniques to assist the decision making on end-of-life strategies. Additive manufacturing-based remanufacturing process has been modelled first, then cost breakdown structure for the process has been created, and the cost model has been developed. Validation of the cost model has been conducted based on expert judgement, and a case study has been carried out by using the developed cost model to compare the benefit of remanufacturing a specified component or making a new one.

This study aims to test a theoretical framework from relational rents (involving relational specific assets, knowledge sharing routines, complementary resources and capabilities and effective governance) that examines buyer-supplier relationships availability remanufacturing operations. Such characteristics are embedded in the Relational View perspective. Despite the economic, environmental and social benefits, remanufacturing is associated concomitantly with many challenges related to the cores remains under explored and add conflicting and dispute perspectives. Remanufacturing has multiple barriers that must be understood and addressed. In order to contribute to this discussion, this manuscript addresses how relational rents occur in remanufacturing within their competitive strategy in the buyer-supplier relationships. The findings showed no found evidence of obtaining competitive advantages clearly delineated by creating relational rents through the contributions of the specific alliance partners and collaborative relationships, but it was possible to highlight the incremental value that comes from individual efforts of each company. The results contribute to both the literature of remanufacturing, and closed-loop supply chains and relational view.

Achieving a sustainable consumption and production pattern is one of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals for 2030. To achieve this, it is necessary to consider the environmental burden from a product life cycle and the quality of life of the consumer. In this study, a systematic approach for connecting basic human needs and the product development process, called the living-sphere approach, is proposed. This approach is intended to encompass the complete relationship between region-specific basic needs and durable products. In this approach, value graphs, which visualize the value system of products, are connected to satisfiers fulfilling the basic needs set out by Max-Neef. A value graph links satisfiers and the traditional product development process. The significance of the proposed approach is twofold. First, improving quality of daily life and traditional product development are combined in the same framework. Second, the design of single products and the total optimization of multi-products are supported at the requirement level.

Remanufacturing is recognized as a major circular economy option to recover and upgrade functions from post-use products. However, the inefficiencies associated with operations, mainly due to the uncertainty and variability of material flows and product conditions, undermine the growth of remanufacturing. With the objective of supporting the design and management of more proficient and robust remanufacturing processes, this paper proposes a generic and reconfigurable simulation model of remanufacturing systems. The developed model relies upon a modular framework that enables the user to handle multiple process settings and production control policies, among which token-based policies. Customizable to the characteristics of the process under analysis, this model can support logistics performance evaluation of different production control policies, thus enabling the selection of the optimal policy in specific business contexts. The proposed model is applied to a real remanufacturing environment in order to validate and demonstrate its applicability and benefits in the industrial settings.

While the average life cycle of consumer goods is continuously decreasing, the amounts of used products at their end-of-life (EOL) is accumulating proportionally fast. Remanufacturing is one of the EOL strategies which is highly environmentally friendly. The selling price of remanufactured products is usually about 50—80% of a new one depending on the quality, making remanufacturing a win—win solution. The goal of this exploratory research is to present the first framework of its kind that aims at assessing the remanufacturability of office furniture. The proposed evaluation model considers three aspects of the assessment problem: economic, social and environmental to obtain a holistic view of the remanufacturability of office furniture. We apply the fuzzy TOPSIS methodology to deal with incomplete and often subjective information during the evaluation process. Furthermore, we validate our evaluation model using published research data for a multi-criteria allocation decision making (MCDM) problem. Through the validation results, we show that the proposed evaluation model has the capability to solve MCDM problems. Lastly, a case study which involves three pieces of office furniture is used to illustrate the application of the proposed model.

In reverse logistics (RL), the returned products are collected, and some recovery activities are performed. The major objective of this research is to identify the RL components of cellphones in Canada focusing on three provinces. There have been some studies in this sector. However, with the technological improvement of cellphones in addition to the evolution of smart phones in recent years, a rapidly growing secondary market has been developed. It is noticeable that the RL of cellphones is very complicated. In this paper, we try to draw a clear picture of the RL framework of cellphones in Canada, highlighting the practices and policies in three provinces including British Columbia in the west coast, Ontario in the middle, and Nova Scotia in the east coast. To this aim, we discuss the chemical, physical, and recoverable parts of cellphones as well as the recovery choices. We review the literature about cellphone RL, identify some relevance as well as differences comparing with the Canadian context, and address some questions pertinent to provincial contexts. We concentrate on the high paced growth of the cellphone secondary market, and the requirement for more research about this subject. Finally, some suggestions and managerial insights are provided about how the cellphone RL can be managed more efficiently.

The question of resource scarcity and emerging pressure of environmental legislations has brought a new challenge for the manufacturing industry. On the one hand, there is a huge population that demands a large quantity of commodities; on the other hand, these demands have to be met by minimum resources and pollution. Resource conservative manufacturing (ResCoM) is a proposed holistic concept to manage these challenges. The successful implementation of this concept requires cross functional collaboration among relevant fields, and among them, closed loop supply chain is an essential domain. The paper aims to highlight some misconceptions concerning the closed loop supply chain, to discuss different challenges, and in addition, to show how the proposed concept deals with those challenges through analysis of key performance indicators (KPI). The work presented in this paper is mainly based on the literature review. The analysis of performance of the closed loop supply chain is done using system dynamics, and the Stella software has been used to do the simulation. The results of the simulation depict that in ResCoM; the performance of the closed loop supply chain is much enhanced in terms of supply, demand, and other uncertainties involved. The results may particularly be interesting for industries involved in remanufacturing, researchers in the field of closed loop supply chain, and other relevant areas. The paper presented a novel research concept called ResCoM which is supported by system dynamics models of the closed loop supply chain to demonstrate the behavior of KPI in the closed loop supply chain.