Quantitative assessment of product remanufacturability

Adopting total lifecycle, closed-loop material flow for sustainable manufacturing helps maximizing value recovery from end-of-life (EoL) products. Product remanufacturing is one strategy to recover value from products after EoL. Many factors such as the quality of EoL returns, product-design characteristics, and process-technology requirements affect the capability to do remanufacturing. However, quantitative methods to evaluate all these aspects are not currently available and companies rely on expert judgement to select products for remanufacturing. This study identifies all key lifecycle-based factors that affect remanufacturability and presents quantitative methods for assessing each of them. The metrics are consolidated to develop an index for EoL product remanufacturability. The developed methodology is validated by applying it to an industrial case study with two product types and comparing results with expert judgements. The findings show that the proposed methodology is effective in evaluating product remanufacturability, presenting a more objective approach to evaluate EoL product(s) for remanufacturing.