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Technological advances in every type of consumer product have improved people’s lives. Products with advanced technologies improve consumers’ lives and thus they are always hungry for them. Because of this, new and advanced products are continuously introduced in the market, and in response, consumers continuously buy and upgrade products. This results in products reaching their End-Of-Lives (EOL) sooner. Therefore, even though a product may be in good condition, its disposal is unavoidable. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), United States generates over 8 billion tons of industrial waste each year, more than one third of which is hazardous. Because of the rate of increasing waste, available landfills are filling up rapidly, and the number of landfills is decreasing at an alarming rate (Gungor & Gupta, 1999). Depletion of natural resources and reduction in the available landfills for disposal has led legislators to require Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to take responsibility of their own EOL products. To comply with the regulations and to make profits, OEMs have started to invest in the product recovery facilities. Product recovery facilities are used to collect returned EOL products and reduce waste by managing EOL products by various recovery processes such as recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing. Product designs with high potential for recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing are ways OEMs can contribute to the conservation of natural resources and manage the EOL products.
The design of a product plays an important role in the EOL product management (Sabaghi et al., 2016). The efficiency of the product recovery processes can have a profound impact on the management of EOL products. Therefore, OEMs would like to consider EOL strategies at the product design stage. Traditionally, product development aims at designing products for cost, functionality, and manufacturability. However, increasing awareness about the environmental issues has forced the product designers to consider environmental factors during the product design phase. Various methodologies to ease the work of designers have been developed, such as Design for X (DfX), Life Cycle Assessment, and material selection. DfX involves different design specialties such as Design for Environment (DfE), Design for Disassembly (DfD), Design for Recycling (DfR), and Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem). Veerakamolmal and Gupta (2000) defined Design for Disassembly (DfD) as the ease of disassembly in the design process. Disassembly is a systematic separation of an assembly into its components, subassemblies, or other groupings (Ondemir & Gupta, 2014). It is an important process as it allows selective separation of desired parts and materials. The aim of DfD is to design products that can be readily disassembled at the end of their lives, to optimize recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing of materials, products, and components. DfD minimizes the complexity of the product structure by minimizing the number of different parts, increasing the use of common materials, optimizing the spatial alignment between various components without affecting the assemblability, functionality, and structural soundness (Veerakamolmal & Gupta, 1999).
Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem) is another method that is of interest here. Remanufacturing is key to sustainable production as it brings back the EOL products to ‘as good as new’ working conditions through a series of processes including disassembly, sorting, cleaning, reconditioning, and assembly. However, there are a few hurdles in carrying out remanufacturing such as heavily damaged components, unavailability of sufficient equipment and labor (Yang et al., 2016). Many of these barriers can be addressed by designing the product for remanufacturing. Charter and Gray (2008) defined DfRem as “a combination of design processes whereby an item is designed to facilitate remanufacture.” It includes a combination of processes such as design for disassembly, design for multiple life-cycles, modular design, and product support for take back decisions. The products/modules/components need to be evaluated to know if they are suitable for remanufacturing. The evaluation includes the following considerations: value and cost of component, reusability, disassemblability (can the component be extracted without damage), economic feasibility of remanufacturing, recoverable value at EOL, remanufacturing cost, disposal options and environmental impact or legislations (Nasr & Thurston, 2006). Therefore, evaluation of product designs for disassembly and remanufacturing is a vital step in EOL product recovery.