Design for High Added-Value End-of-Life Strategies

Abstract

Sustainable manufacturing is a rising issue. Ensuring both consumer satisfaction and minimal environmental impact is very challenging. In that whole process, it is customary to say that the design stage determines 80 % of the future environmental impact. One way to contain this impact at an acceptable level is to manage the products’ end-of-life from the design activities. This chapter points out product reuse strategies—i.e. direct reuse and remanufacturing—aiming at con- serving the added-value of used products as much as possible into new products. The first contribution attempts to provide a state-of-the-art of design for these high added-value end-of-life strategies. Direct reuse and remanufacturing are thus analysed and the principal design guidelines are furthermore given, classified according to three dimensions: product, process and business model. This chapter then contributes to enlarging the spectrum of reuse strategies, presenting an inno- vative end-of-life strategy: repurposing. It consists of reusing products in other applications after transformations. The main challenges of such a strategy will be discussed.