Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Remanufacturing (second strategy of Allwood et al. (2011)) can make for a
very attractive business, since the embodied energy and material costs have already
been invested. However, very few companies design for remanufacture. Nowadays
environmental legislation or intellectual property protection rather than resource
e
ciency provide stronger motives for remanufacturing. In any case the process
must always be linked to a reverse logistics system and opportunities increase with
product maturity in the market. Rapidly changing technologies are however far
from prone to the remanufacturing process. As Söderholm and Tilton (2012) state:
“Longer lifetimes imply a slower rate of capital turnover but also then a lost op-
portunity to produce more energy and material e
cient products”. Car tuning is
an interesting example to highlight this issue. It consists of partially remanufac-
turing the car for performance upgrading and appearance, and personalises it at
the owner's sake. Such actions have been often stigmatised and reserved for “racing
junkies” or “boy racers”, but given a closer look, it provides a stimulating example
of overall upgrading, promoting longevity, customising, not to mention new job and
community creation.
A third option for material e
ciency proposed by Allwood et al. (2011) is com-
ponent re-use or non-destructive recycling. Ageing differs for each component of
any industrial product. Designing for disassembly gives potential to a longer life of
separate components. It also creates new operations and jobs devoted to closing ma-
terial cycles. These include disassembly, separation, sorting, inspection, cleaning,
repair, reassembling, testing, quality certification, storage and distribution.
An e
cient recycling system needs concurrent engineering
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in the design pro-
cess. The design idea for X must be as inclusive as possible, where X might repre-
sent disassembly, quality, environment, waste prevention, remanufacturing, usability
and re-usability, testability, corrosion prevention, maintainability and other related
issues (Huang, 1996). Obviously, recycling will only be feasible if recovery tech-
nology is available and the volume of materials is enough to allow for investment
turnover.
In this way and connected to the services economy, MacLean et al. (2010) pro-
pose that “manufacturers of electric goods, electronics, and vehicles can benefit
from taking over producer responsibility in a stricter sense. Designing products
with high recyclability, collecting them at EoL and feeding them into controlled
effective recycling chains would generate in-house supplies of raw materials”.
The final strategy for Allwood et al. (2011) involves “using less material to
provide the same service”. The authors have already discussed this idea in the
Dematerialisation Principle (no. 10). However an important issue here relates to
recycling. Some substitute materials are di
cult to recycle. This is the case for
composites. Composites or lightweight materials like magnesium or rare earths in
aluminum alloys increase the cost of collection and separation and make recycling
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Anastas and Zimmerman (2003) provides clues as to how one might achieve Green Engineering
following their 12 principles.
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