A strategy for product reuse in support of life-cycle engineering

The new manufacturing paradigm is one that values agility in product and process design, in order to cope with fast changing technological and economical environments. One more dimension also must be added to the equation, and this is the consideration of the environmental load imposed by the choice of the materials and processes of manufacturing. Life-cycle engineering advocates a holistic approach to many engineering applications, such as design, operations, and end-of-life disposal. For the latter applications, reusing old products or components is regarded as the most environmentally friendly strategy among all other end-of-life strategies. This paper presents an integrated technical and economic model to evaluate the reusability of products or components. It is a follow-up paper to a previous one by two of the authors - one that deals with the same topic except that no environmental costs were taken into consideration in the original work. This paper applies the concept of willingness to pay (WTP) to derive the environmental costs for the parts. The main consequence of including environmental costs in the model is to confirm the initial suspicion that more parts would be amenable to being reused once the environmental costs are taken into consideration, and that a different set of parts would be selected, although a majority of the parts for reuse remain the same whether one considers environmental costs or not.