A new methodology for end-of-life option determination and disassemblability analysis

Abstract

Nowadays many countries have developed new legislations which are aimed at greater emphasis to force manufacturers to reuse, recycle, recover, and remanufacture their products at the end of their life. However, an essential process for the recycling and/or reuse/remanufacturing of end-of-life products is product disassembly. This entails large amounts of capital expenditure, and most manufacturers would not like to even consider disassembling and remanufacturing unless capital costs are justified and financial gains assured. To enhance the recycling process, it is necessary to analyze the product from the end-of-life point of view. Without the understanding of end-of-life aspect, the ease of disassembly and recycling of a product can hardly be enhanced. Therefore, there is a strong need for developing a new methodology to evaluate the product disassemblability aspect and to determine its technological and economic impact at the end-of-life. This paper presents a new methodology to fulfill the above needs. It integrates the end-of-life option determination and disassemblability evaluation in one framework. The proposed methodology is divided into five stages: (1) Define the product; (2) Determine the end-of-life option and calculate the end-of-life value; (3) Evaluate the disassemblability and calculate the disassembly cost; (4) Calculate the recycling rate; and (5) Disassembly evaluation report. In order to show the application of the proposed methodology, a case study was conducted. The results of the case study prove that the methodology is able to show how economically efficient is it to disassemble a product and identify the opportunity of a component to be reused and/or recycled/remanufactured.