Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
www.cleanerproduction.net
Product recovery with some byte: an overview of management
challenges and environmental consequences in reverse
manufacturing for the computer industry
Charles David White a,∗, Eric Masanet b, Christine Meisner Rosen c, Sara L. Beckman c
b
a
Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3050, USA
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1740, USA
c
Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1900, USA
Accepted 10 May 2002
Abstract
Estimates vary about the rate at which end-of-life computer products have been piling up, but the total population of spent
computers is likely to reach into the hundreds of millions. To tackle this mounting solid and hazardous waste problem, policy and
business entrepreneurs are promoting product recovery as an environmentally preferable alternative to disposal, and product recovery
infrastructure and strategy has begun to develop in recent decades. However, despite some real and theoretical developments in
the field, current literature lacks an overall description of the recovery process capable of capturing the essence of end-of-life
management challenges for complex, rapidly obsolete, high-tech products like computers and electronics. The absence of this broad
frame of reference presents a problem for managers trying to integrate environmentally sound choices into planning and management.
Using case research from the computer and electronics industry, in this paper we present a generalized overview of product recovery.
The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to describe the recovery of computers as a step-by-step process, and to frame an environmental
research agenda for recovery management. With an eye toward generalizing the growing and diversifying practices in reverse
manufacturing, we use our description from the computer and electronics industry to highlight broad challenges that managers
confront at each stage of the process and to identify environmental dimensions of product recovery management decisions that
require additional research.
 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Product recovery; Computer; Reverse manufacturing; Demanufacturing; Remanufacturing; Design for environment; Environmental management
1. Introduction
In the course of examining the reverse manufacturing
infrastructure for computer products, we met with a
manager, whom we will call Kate, at a small, socially
responsible business in a large metropolitan city. Kate
is aware of the growing attention paid to businesses like
hers in the popular press1 and knows that, although the
number of desktop computers clustered in attics and
back offices is not known, the estimated population of
obsolete equipment is already in the hundreds of millions
[1,2]. With concerns about electronics waste mounting
almost as rapidly as spent computers are piling up, Kate
recognizes that modern consumption patterns and the
ubiquity of electronic equipment are creating a large
1
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: cdwhite@socrates.berkeley.edu (C.D. White).
Recent examples include ‘Drowning in e-Waste’ by Henry Norr
in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 27, 2001, page E1), ‘Computer
Overload’ by Jack Naudi in the Grand Rapid Press (March 11, 2001,
page B1), and ‘Computer meltdown’ by L. Rapaport in the San Jose
Mercury News (April 18, 2000, page 1F).
0959-6526/02/$ - see front matter.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0959-6526(02)00066-5
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solid waste problem and that many people are looking,
hopefully, to reverse manufacturing2 as a solution.
Kate owns and operates one of an increasing number
of companies emerging to recover assets from end-oflife equipment. Like the other seven small and large
computer recovery businesses we visited, Kate struggles
with the challenges common to recovering obsolete products: locating and collecting spent products, adjusting
to the extreme heterogeneity in the computers she
encounters, evaluating which assets are valuable and
cost-effective to recover, determining how to disassemble computers and sort computer assets efficiently,
and establishing and maintaining market relationships to
sell her wares. Reflecting its origins in recovery and
resale of computer chips from telecommunications
equipment, Kate’s firm focuses on brokering reusable
computer products. On the surface, this approach to product recovery is consistent with the literature on reverse
manufacturing, which tends to emphasize operational
aspects of remanufacturing products—that is, locating
end-of-life equipment, refurbishing their cores, and
reselling the intact products. However, a more detailed
examination of Kate’s experience and that of the other
computer recovery businesses we visited reveals a different story. Because most end-of-life computers contain
obsolete technologies and outdated architectures, products enter the reverse manufacturing business with little
reusable potential. As a result, instead of focusing on
recovering and rebuilding product cores, most computer
recovery businesses engage in demanufacturing computers—that is, disassembling products and atomizing
assets to divert waste and recapture value wherever practicable. Taken in composite, these computer recovery
operations illuminate the difference between remanufacturing (refurbishment-oriented) and demanufacturing
(recycling-oriented) as complementary reverse manufacturing strategies. The commonality is that both involve
a whole host of operational choices, such as which products to collect, how to organize the shop floor, or which
markets to seek for selling process outputs.
Like Kate, businesses and governments alike have
recognized that recovery offers advantages over disposal’s drain on natural and financial resources, and they
are considering infrastructure to recover spent products.
Drivers include the desire to profit from retrieving and
reselling still-valuable products and product assets, the
need to manage product returns from leasing programs,
quick manufacturing cycles and the need to procure parts
to support longer-term warranty programs, concerns
about toxic liabilities from disposal of products with
their brand name on them, and greener industrial ethics
and consumer markets. Governments at all levels are
developing waste handling prohibitions, regulations, or
2
For definitions for this and other terms, please see Appendix A.
incentive programs to encourage alternative disposition
of electronic waste [3] and considering policies to make
the producer or the consumer of products more responsible for ensuring their safe disposition [4]. These motivations help to explain why, in recent years, the rate of
electronic reuse and recycling has steadily increased, and
why in America the volume of products recovered is
expected to increase at an annual rate of 18% [5]. These
developments reinforce the theoretical ideals about closing industrial material cycles that underlie contemporary
green industrial movements and, through this lens, portend a greener industrial future. However, despite the
environmental hopes that the computer recovery infrastructure offers, little attention has been paid to its
environmental consequences along the supply chain.
One of Kate’s desires is to ensure that her reverse manufacturing capitalizes on green design and management
opportunities. Unfortunately, insufficient environmental
impact analysis is available to help her.
This article, which describes the experience of Kate
and other computer recovery companies, has two parts.
First, we provide an anatomy of ‘reverse manufacturing’
and describe it as a step-by-step process analog to the
‘forward manufacturing’ activities traditionally used to
bring products to market. Most researchers who have
examined recovery for complex, high technology products like computers have concentrated on the front end
of the reverse manufacturing process and the infrastructures to remanufacture equipment for reuse. We focus
more specifically on the demanufacturing challenges in
product recovery and the way that residual components
and durable materials are stripped from computer equipment for sale as inputs into myriad manufacturing industries. This, we argue, is a more accurate depiction of
reverse manufacturing for high-value but rapidly obsolete products like computers. Second, we use our synopsis of this recovery enterprise to identify and explore a
variety of environmental consequences of reverse manufacturing design and operation. These environmental
issues lie hidden underneath the practical logistical, technological, and economic decisions that shape business
practices. Although ‘recycling’ is often discussed in
terms of its environmental benefits, there are also
environmental costs, such as energy intensity and
material downgrading, that require attention. As global
economies move toward a recovery-oriented approach to
electronic waste, it becomes increasingly important to
measure these potential negative impacts and to mitigate
them. Both our description of a reverse supply chain and
our analysis of environmental challenges common to all
reverse manufacturing have dual intentions: to provide
a basis for further research into the environmental
dimensions of product recovery, and to help policy makers and others interested in moving the computer industry toward sustainability consider the complexities of
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
putting reverse manufacturing on an environmentally
optimal path.
2. A description of product recovery
Much of the early literature on reverse manufacturing
concerns the technology and logistics of recovery for
products such as beverage containers, toner cartridges,
and tires, whose relatively simple design and composition makes their recovery relatively straightforward
and requires little attention to reverse supply chains.
Increasingly, however, operations’ researchers are attuning their research to much more complex products, like
computers, photocopying machines, and automobiles.
These products’ multi-step reverse manufacturing occurs
in relatively elaborate supply chains and produces multiple ownership patterns that place different parties in
control at different stages of the process. Understanding
the managerial and environmental challenges of product
recovery for these industries requires investigation of
supply chain dynamics, and operations researchers are
now beginning to explore the associated logistics, technologies, and economics. Their ongoing work provides
insight into the range of discrete product handling and
assessment tasks that constitute and support reverse
manufacturing in these industries, and Daniel Guide
offers an excellent summary of progress to date and
future challenges [6]. Our study builds on this more
recent work, while delving more deeply into demanufacturing of computer equipment than most of the existing research.
In addition to drawing on recently published case
research and other scholarly literature3, this study is
based on field research. In 1998 we conducted interviews
at eight firms involved in the reverse remanufacturing
supply chain, including three OEMs or OEM partnerships and five non-OEMs. Our interviews consisted of
one hour of discussion, approximately one hour of
facility tour, and subsequent phone conversations with
plant managers. The firms we visited operate some of
the most advanced and most basic product recovery programs in the United States and are involved in various
mixes of the stages in recovery. These case subjects
serve as the basis of our description of computer recovery. Because we are focusing on their common experience with desktop computers, our description emphasizes the demanufacturing aspects of product recovery
3
For the computer and electronics industry, the most consistent
source for coverage of new experience and ideas about product recovery has been the proceedings from the annual IEEE Symposium on
Electronics and the Environment. Even obliquely, very little coverage
has been available in other literary fora, but this paucity is changing
as interest from the operations management and business contracting
community grows.
447
and ignores associated remanufacturing (e.g., with mainframe computers). Naturally, these simplifications
reduce the deductive power of the model: like forward
manufacturing, reverse manufacturing is highly variable
and, like photocopy machines and automobiles, computers are an idiosyncratic case study4. Acknowledging
these limitations, we use our experience to expand existing descriptions and to provide a broad overview of
reverse manufacturing in practice. In this section, we
highlight fundamental management challenges common
to all reverse manufacturing and begin this discussion
first with a description of computer products before turning our attention to the step-by-step process.
2.1. Inputs and outputs
Broadly consistent with product recovery literature,
practitioners discuss recoverable assets in three broad
classes of process outputs: the whole product, designed
parts, and constituent materials. Understanding management and planning for recovery of durable products
requires understanding the potential outputs from the
reverse manufacturing process. This, in turn, requires
understanding the process inputs (the recoverable product themselves). Computer products as inputs to recovery span a wide array of types, makes, models, and years.
Because desktop computers are the driving force behind
these recovery processes, for the sake of simplicity it is
easy to consider a generic desktop computer as the core
input for reverse manufacturing.
An average desktop computer consists of three primary subassemblies: the central processing unit (CPU),
the monitor, and other input/output peripherals such as
keyboards, mice, or speakers. These subassemblies contain the various recoverable parts. The CPU contains
hard and disk drives, circuit boards with integrated circuit chips, impact-resistant plastic casings, an internal
metal framework, small batteries, motors, power supplies, and cables. The cathode ray tube-based monitor is
housed in an impact-resistant plastic shell and composed
of a leaded glass funnel and coated glass front panel, a
4
Much like automobiles and copy machines, computers have
become integral to modern living and commerce. However, their
characteristics as products separate them from these others and create
new challenges not addressed by existing research. Like automobiles
and copy machines, computers are complex, complicated goods and
contain hazardous materials which require careful disposal. Unlike
automobiles, computers are marked by rapid technological obsolescence, weak recovery infrastructure, and little lay culture for repair
and reuse. These features make computer life cycles much shorter and
their end-of-life reuse opportunities much more limited. Unlike copy
machines, computers are generally sold, not leased by the manufacturer
or an agent who works closely with the forward supply chain. As a
result, many details about computer products, such as their location,
age, and current condition, are not available to the firm recovering
them.
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cathode, and circuitry. The peripheral equipment is comprised of minor circuitry and some movable parts, most
of which are not readily salable in their own right. The
materials recoverable from this medley of components
include ferrous metals, aluminum, copper, precious metals, polystyrene and ABS plastics, thermosetting epoxy
plastics, leaded and unleaded glass, and hazardous
wastes like batteries (see Fig. 1). Because products are
often transported with appreciable amounts of paper,
cardboard, and polystyrene foams, these materials also
require disposition and present parallel material management challenges [7,8].
Like the manufacturing process, reverse manufacturing requires choices about how, and how much, to
engage in various stages of operation, and at first glance
these processes can appear to be the converse of one
another. In practice, though, recovery outputs are not
simply manufacturing inputs. To put it briefly, physical
laws, financial payback, hefty information demands,
available technologies, and ownership structures all
affect the admixture of final goods. Thermodynamically,
entropy impedes the ability to distil product assets at
end-of-life, such that thorough reclamation of assets is
only possible with colossal inputs of energy. This constraint, in short, means that we cannot get everything
back out of a product that we put into it [9,10]. Economically speaking, the payback on reclaimed assets bounds
the investment in recovery. Because reclamation is only
viable if someone is willing to pay for it, managers must
balance the level of asset purification with market prices
for materials and overall recovery profitability. From a
logistical standpoint, managing recovery operations
requires detailed information about product quantity,
quality, timing, and composition—data which are particularly challenging to procure with current infrastructure. In addition, reverse manufacturing demands new
technologies of disassembly, which in some cases reveal
a need for new technologies for assembly as well. Collaboration between assemblers and disassemblers is
often desirable to facilitate such technological developments, as reflected by joint partnerships and vertical integration to improve communication and control along the
supply chain.
In short, this abridged laundry list of challenges
begins to explain how recovery operation and management affect the end products of reverse manufacturing
and prevent the outputs from being essentially a reverse
bill of materials for the inputs. Because profitable recovery requires choosing outputs vis-à-vis the potential
admixtures of refurbishable products, reusable parts, and
recyclable materials, managers faced with the challenges
nominally introduced in this paragraph are struggling to
improve their understandings of reverse manufacturing
processes. It is to this topic that we turn in the next section.
2.2. The process
Although detailed process descriptions are somewhat
lacking, existing models of reverse manufacturing offer
a conceptual starting point for explaining computer
recovery [10,11,12, 13]. These models introduce the idea
of reverse manufacturing as a multi-stage process and
often use the concept of closed-loop manufacturing to
draw its operations parallel to forward manufacturing.
Fig. 2 illustrates this idea with a picture of production
and recovery as halves of a circular industrial process.
In Fig. 2, generic stages involved in forward manufacturing are depicted along the left side of the picture:
material manufacturing, component manufacturing, product assembly, and distribution and sale. The stages on
the right half of the loop are stylized depictions of the
Fig. 1. A desktop computer and its assets.
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
Fig. 2.
449
Supply loop (forward manufacturing on the left; reverse manufacturing on the right in bold).
activities constituting reverse manufacturing: acquisition, assessment, disassembly, and reprocessing5.
Drawn in the middle of the diagram are two ancillary
stages intended to return reconditioned products back to
use: testing and repair, which may operate in conjunction
with forward-chain warranty and service programs, and
redistribution and resale, which may be confluent with
forward distribution and sale. In addition, there are two
virtual stages not depicted in this diagram, product
design and contracting strategy, which influence the
entire process but exceed the complexity of our basic
input-output model6. In our discussion, we focus on the
four primary recovery stages on the left: acquisition,
assessment, disassembly, and reprocessing.
5
We acknowledge that preceding authors have used different terminology to describe the stages in product recovery (see Ferrer and
Whybark, 2000). We have chosen our categories to reflect our focus
on the design or information content of assets. This approach allows us
to consider the ‘value’ of products, components, and materials jointly.
6
For the environmental goals we pursue, greater understanding of
the roles that multiple process flows play in manufacturing is needed
to understand the shared, iterative learning that defines design for the
environment (DfE) efforts and the motivations for particular contracting strategies. We leave these details for future research.
Our research exposed several distinctions between
existing models of durable product recovery and the
experience of computer reverse manufacturing. The principal differences we found stem from assumptions about
product outputs and the role of the original equipment
manufacturer (OEM). Most recovery models focus on
OEM refurbishment and reuse of product ‘cores’ to produce remanufactured products, such as the reclamation
of an engine or a chassis to rebuild a car. This emphasis
is rare in computer recovery, whose independent actors
overwhelmingly commodify and disperse product assets.
By this statement we mean that most computers are not
disassembled to collect the motherboard, the microprocessor, the power supply, or any other component and
to then rebuild a new product around it. Instead, products
that cannot be reused intact are disassembled and their
products are scattered for reuse wherever feasible. Sometimes this pragmatism involves reuse in a wholly different product. For example, a microchip taken from a
desktop computer may be reused in toys, or the plastics
from a computer may be recycled into telephony. In
describing computer recovery, we omit an exhaustive
discussion of all such possible outcomes and instead
ground and generalize our description at each stage in
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C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
the simple loop of Fig. 2. We believe that the dispersion
of product assets underlies the state of relative confusion
and the struggle for operational norms in computer
recovery and, as we offer an overview of the process,
we ask the reader to keep these ideas in mind.
2.2.1. Acquisition
The most basic questions a reverse manufacturer must
ask are, which products do I want and how do I get
them? That is, before a product is recovered, a recovery
business must select a type of product, locate it, collect
it, and transport it to a processing facility. These activities define the first stage in recovery, which we call
acquisition. Ideally, reverse logistics planning and network design are used to control the timing, quantity,
composition, and quality of products as they enter the
recovery process [14]. If this level of control is available,
acquisition procedures can significantly reduce the
uncertainty of inputs (quantity and timing) as well as the
need for contingency planning and manufacturing flexibility (composition and quality). If not, intermittent and
heterogeneous products flows and information asymmetry about product condition cause confusion and inefficiency in reverse manufacturing. This latter description
is representative of current dynamics in computer recovery, whose product characteristics and existing infrastructure have not facilitated sophisticated acquisition.
With little ability to control the flow of process inputs,
businesses take what they can find, collect, and ship to
their processing facilities. The characteristics are evident
in the tasks of selection, location, collection, and transportation.
2.2.1.1. Selection and information asymmetry.
In
some cases (e.g., the growing market for end-of-life
cellular telephones), reverse manufacturers are
developing the capacity to select products and discriminate in their acquisition prices based on model, age, and
condition. The information and infrastructure needed to
support this particularistic transaction is not available for
most computer products, and most products make their
way into the recovery process with very little pre-screening. Generally, the products are received from OEM inhouse uses or from upgrade contracts with large users,
such as financial institutions. Smaller firms without
OEM contracts attempt to tap product flows through
cold-calls, brochures, and direct solicitation of end-users.
However, because of the current glut of end-of-life products in garages and storerooms, most businesses are
able to procure spot contracts by word of mouth. Firms
like Kate’s also make special provision for donations
from the community, but many have blanket policies
against drop-offs or charge fees for end-of-life disposition because older products generally are net costs to
process. In short, product selection is not highly specific
and discriminating, and computer recovery businesses
generally accept broad categories of equipment.
Along with the lack of information comes potentially
problematic information asymmetry. For example, endof-life batches can contain a large number of products
that the donor knows are missing valuable components,
or are not working. Such adverse selection and moral
hazards problems can significantly reduce recovery
profitability if businesses are unable to discriminate
between products because they cannot tell if products
are operable, or contain all the expected parts. The case
is easy to understand for an office computer. During the
course of its lifetime, it may have several components
upgraded or removed, such as the memory chips. Recovery companies with arms-length relationships and dealing in spot end-of-life management contracts often interact only with the facilities staff, who often have little
data about IT equipment’s composition. Unless the
recovery business can obtain information about product
condition from the computer staff who serviced the
equipment, they find it difficult to discriminate with variable prices for different products. Instead, their best
guess is that the product contains the same components
as when it was originally sold, but these guesses are
often wrong. For this reason, some firms negotiate recovery contacts with two-part tariffs: a fixed-fee to cover
overhead and a tolling fee to cover per-product costs of
recovery. This type of dual scheme protects a recovery
firm against broken products and those altered during
their lifetime. An alternative protection against these
effects is to seek an additional profitability buffer. We
observed some companies turning to government grants,
parent-company overhead, or joint ventures to steady
revenue streams.
2.2.1.2. Intermittence and heterogeneity.
Although
demand-side concerns about proliferating electronic
wastes appear to be creating a push for alternative disposition, businesses still struggle to guard themselves
against intermittent, batch flows of products, which disrupt the efficient use of labor and shop space. (In fact,
the uncertainty in computer product flow rates motivates
firms to employ half of their work force as temporary
labor.) To buffer against the unpredictable nature of a
batch retrieval process, computer recovery firms compensate for intermittent flows by developing multiple
sources of equipment. A consequence of this approach
can be an extremely heterogeneous feed stream, which
requires more information, learning, and shop floor
flexibility. For example, to stabilize its inputs, one firm
we visited recovers everything from medical diagnostic
equipment to microwave ovens, from desktop computers
to vacuum cleaners. For those processing such a wide
array of products, knowledge about the product compositions becomes essential for identifying and recovering
the full value of product assets. If the components of a
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
product remain unclear or unknown, disassembly and
resale cannot attend to them. To simplify information
demands, some recoverers are able to reduce the number
of input sources to their process, but even that approach
can fail to guard against surprises. One OEM manager,
who was operating a recovery program for only his company’s in-house use, told us about a time that he opened
a semi trailer and discovered office furniture
accompanying the computer equipment he expected.
Because acquisition was unable to control process
inputs, managing this unfamiliar equipment became a net
cost and a learning exercise in end-of-life furniture disposition.
2.2.1.3. Collection transportation network design.
Three distinct modes of collection and transportation
have emerged in reverse manufacturing: curbside pickup by the municipal government, customer drop-off or
pay-as-you go collection, and producer or reverse manufacturer retrieval, sometimes through a common carrier.
No universally dominant paradigm has emerged7, and
the tendency toward each appears to depend on the
assignment of responsibility for end-of-life disposition
to the government, the consumer, or the producer.
Despite some pilot projects, curbside collection programs are not a developed avenue into the recovery process. In the US, where only faint rumblings about endof-life product legislation are audible, few programs
exists for customers to return their products to manufacturers or sale outlets. Only those consumers who can
accept that their once valuable gizmo has no residual
value and who live close enough to a recovery business
can donate and drop off old equipment. (For others,
curbside waste collection or attic stockpiling are the only
alternatives.) Most of the products we observed entered
the recovery process from commercial contracts or from
OEM operations (including leased goods, defects, excess
inventory, production rejects or scraps, or in-house
equipment upgrades). Because these acquisition efforts
do not involve steady streams of products and are not
collected far and wide from consumers, no one we interviewed was actively considering coordination or integration of collection and transportation with the countercurrent distribution channels. Instead, most shipments
were scheduled on a case-by-case basis, and in most
cases the customer paid the cost of collection and transportation.
2.2.2. Assessment
Once equipment has arrived at the facility, managers
must determine which assets are valuable and, given that
7
Some researchers studying electronic wastes have attributed tendencies toward municipal collection in the US, consumer responsibility
in Japan, and producer handling in Europe [4]. All three do occur in
the US, but our experience is primarily with producer-driven recovery.
451
products parts, and materials are mutually exclusive outputs, the optimal mixture of them to recover. This evaluation of inputs and outputs to choose a trajectory for
recovery is the assessment stage of reverse manufacturing. During assessment, businesses determine whether to
repair, refurbish, renovate, recondition, retrofit, or just
plain resell a product or its parts and generally do so
when products first arrive and are sorted. This input
appraisal and output planning parse the process inputs
into revenue streams of recoverable products, recoverable parts, as well as recoverable materials and costs
streams of unrecoverable wastes. Theoretically, assessment should be integrated into overall process planning
and direct selection activities [15], but computer assessment sometimes does not occur until after the product
is partially disassembled. To some extent this timing in
assessment depends on whether the product is considered a marketable good or waste upon receipt. When
end-of-life products are still considered potentially marketable goods, a value-oriented approach can be used to
discriminate in product quality and to control input variety through selective acquisition of products [16]. That
is, recovery firms can streamline assessment and
improve the cost-effectiveness of subsequent recovery
operations by using the acquisition process to select products based on quality or variety. For end-of-life products already considered wastes, product recovery is
viewed as a means of diverting computers from landfills
or incineration. For this waste-oriented approach, control
of input streams through active selection is usually not
possible because little information about the product is
available in the selection process. This dearth of data
delays assessment until after acquisition. That is, if
organizations can only vaguely, if at all, choose which
products to acquire, they simply get whatever is in the
semi trailer and work from there. This lack of control
constitutes one of the greatest risks in recovery and
requires repeat assessment or assessment-on-the-fly to
evaluate unfamiliar products as the are disassembled.
The primary challenges for conducting assessment are
incomplete information about inputs and market immaturity for outputs.
2.2.2.1. Incomplete information.
Understanding the
assessment process requires recognizing the fundamental
distinction that production adds value to and recovery
extracts value from a computer, which is otherwise categorized as waste and discarded. Unless relatively complete and accurate information is available at the onset,
managers must reassess the value of asset recovery and
choose among disposition alternatives at each stage or
sub-stage of recovery. To evaluate products, organizations use information about product compositions, asset
values, reclamation methods, and the markets for recovered assets to determine recovery strategy. For
example, a manager might compare the cost of disas-
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sembling a computer to recover a hard drive or another
component against its expected resale price; similarly the
manager might determine the expected copper content
and then weigh the cost of copper purification against
commodity prices for copper. The data needed to perform more detailed market forecasts and economic
analyses are often not readily available, even for OEMs
recovering their own products. Indeed, one OEM’s
assessment initially relied on casual review by technical
staff of sale prices in trade journals. For small firms
without a connection to product manufacturers,
obtaining this information can be difficult or prohibitively costly to procure in the face of batches of heterogeneous product inputs. However, most viable businesses have recognized the need to have dedicated sales
forces to make this information available.
2.2.2.2. Market identification. Without much data to
facilitate assessment, managers must still make decisions
about which assets to recover. Judging the risks associated with the recovery of assets is challenging in the
absence of information about the structure of the costs.
In addition, managers must determine whether to sell
recovered goods into existing markets or whether to seek
or to create new markets. With little forged connection
or direct relationship with the forward manufacturing
process, reverse manufacturers must identify or develop
markets for recovered assets. In addition to inventory
challenges associated with balancing returns with
demands [17], the changing architectures, rapid rates of
technological obsolescence, and relatively weak resale
markets for used computer assets, product and part
recovery can be risky. Because mature secondary markets for metals exists, recovery of commodity materials
is the primary driver for most computer recovery [8].
Among firms attempting to recover and resell design
components, we observed distinct differences in strategy. Unless under contract to do otherwise, non-OEM
firms seek to resell any valuable designed assets, particularly intact computers. Kate told us that equipment
brokering is extremely profitable, with 80% of her profits
coming from the 20% of the equipment that she can
resell. However, brand loyalty and market protectionism
can affect product or part recovery: some OEMs destroy
proprietary technologies to prevent their secondary sales
from cannibalizing primary markets. (In fact, one firm
we interviewed internalized its previously outsourced
recovery operations to gain control over secondary product streams.) This unintended consequence of protecting market share obstructs the reuse of some useful
assets, such as brand-name hard drives8.
8
As a related point, some disassembly firms offer guaranteed data
erasing services on hard drives. Although this service protects the
security and intellectual property of clients, it does not necessarily
destroy the equipment.
2.2.3. Disassembly
Preceding authors have introduced relevant terminology [13, 18], and we acknowledge and borrow from
this literature when describing disassembly. In a nutshell, product disassembly is the stage of actual deconstruction of a good to sort its assets for reuse, recycling,
or disposal. The first phase of disassembly improves the
accessibility of reusable subassemblies and parts, usually
by opening the product. The second phase is the removal
of any reusable parts. The third phase prepares the
remainder of the product for material recovery [7]. Not
all disassembly proceeds through these stages in the
same way. When disassembling, some firms disaggregate a product to preserve all of its designed components. This careful unfastening of parts occurs when a
firm wants to recover numerous valuable components for
reuse or resale, and we only encountered this type of
disassembly when a large, expensive product, such as a
mainframe computer, was repaired or remanufactured
for reuse. A majority of the products we observed were
dismantled or disassembled in such a way that certain
assets were demolished to recover others. For example,
to save time when recovering internal components, plastic panels and casings are often irreparably broken. Similarly, the removal of integrated circuits may cannibalize
motherboards by damaging them during disassembly. In
other cases, lower-end or obsolete products require no
attention to design value and are simply demolished.
This demolition, which destroys all design value, is the
predominant recovery strategy when firms are interested
in recycling materials instead of recovering designed
assets. We observed multiple types of demolition. One
firm demolishes equipment with large shredding equipment, grinding products into small material chunks for
separation and sale. Another firm specialized in computer monitor recovery destroys the product design content by separating the panel glass and funnel glass from
cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and then crushing them separately. Each of the three styles of disassembly represents
a different degree of design value retention for recovery
and affects the distribution and value of product assets.
Some businesses have developed semi-continuous
operating lines along which disassemblers unscrew, pry
open, or break apart computer products; more often disassembly takes place at a semi-circular workbench surrounded by bins for various parts and materials [19]. In
either case, the disassembly of products and segregation
of their assets greatly multiplies the number of recovery
streams and subsequent transactions: reusable subassemblies and parts are sent to repair shops, manufacturers, or retail outlets; scrap parts are further separated
and purified for material recovery; and as residues are
hauled away by scavengers or waste disposal companies.
Process planning is needed to manage these streams
efficiently, but uncooperative designs, information poverty, and constraints from upstream choices impede it.
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
2.2.3.1. Uncooperative designs. Under the auspices of
design for the environment (DfE), researchers and product designers are beginning to investigate ways to
improve the design of products to facilitate their disassembly, as opposed to simply optimizing their assembly.
Among those interested in computers, a principle concern is the way that products are fastened. Chips soldered to circuit boards and drives riveted to internal structures are difficult and costly to remove. Engineering
research into development of extraction and separation
technology [20, 21] and economic assessment of technological options continue to improve the cost-effectiveness of recovering product assets [22, 23], but changing
product designs may be the only way to overcome some
hurdles. Because many organizations in the reverse supply chain do not have a relationship with the forward
supply chain and the organizations that design and
assemble products, DFE requires alternate fora, such as
research conferences or chartered collaborations, to communicate information between those who design and
make products and those who recover them.
2.2.3.2. Information poverty.
Like acquisition and
assessment, a lack of information thwarts disassembly.
To disassemble a product efficiently, an organization
needs to know what and where the assets are in it, but
most disasssemblers do not have a product bill of
materials nor a schematic. Even OEMs recovering their
own products lacked this information and were engaging
in database development efforts to collect and compile
it. In some cases, even these efforts are insufficient since
some products are modified during their lifetimes. However, detailed product information helps organizations to
avoid expensive search-and-rescue operations for regulated components like batteries, which are illegal to
resmelt with metals. When information about products
is not readily available, many firms tend to dismantle or
demolish potentially valuable assets in their efforts to
quickly and cheaply disassemble products. This ignorance of product contents and designs is one reason that
an OEM recovered only twelve percent of a product’s
weight for resale and recycled or discarded the remaining eight-eight percent. Practitioners and researchers
alike suggest that greater information availability, either
through consortia, regulations, or longer-term contracts,
can improve disassembly and production management.
[24].
2.2.3.3. Upstream choices.
Choices made upstream
can significantly affect disassembly management. The
information demand created from acquisition decisions
is a good example. A choice to collect a wider variety
of equipment as a way to stabilize an otherwise intermittent input stream increases information demand during
assessment and disassembly: composition data and
assets values are needed for more products and their
453
components. This need for information raises the bar for
recovery of whole products and parts. Accordingly, a
choice to recover products in bulk drives decisions to
recycle commodity materials instead of recovering the
more challenging, but higher-value, reusable parts.
2.2.4. Reprocessing
Once a product has been disassembled and all reusable
subassemblies and parts have been removed, the leftover
assets are valuable only for their material contents. As
illustrated in Fig. 1, there are seven primary categories
of materials recovered from computers (eight if packaging is included): ferrous metals, aluminum, copper, precious metals (e.g., gold, palladium, and silver), glass,
plastics, and hazardous wastes9. The goal of material
reprocessing is to reclaim these materials in salable
quantities, and businesses naturally try to maximize profits by optimizing the benefits of purifying materials
against the cost or doing so. Initial separation occurs by
hand during disassembly, either on a disassembly line
or at a workbench, to sort assets into basic categories
according to material content. For example, because of
its large copper coil, a motor would be thrown into a
bin for copper recovery. These disassembly output bins
are material processing inputs streams consisting of a
mixture of parts segregated by their highest value
materials. For example, boxes containing the cables and
wires are typically transported for copper recovery, and
the bins for many of the larger internal components (e.g.,
disk drives, structural pieces) are sent to steel mills.
Before materials from these disowned computer parts are
recycled, they are commonly shredded and ground down
into small pieces and then separated in an automated
process according to their densities and electromagnetic
properties. This final separation step decreases the volume and increases the purity of the materials.
The process of recycling is different for each substance, and the various material streams are shipped to
facilities specializing in their reclamation. Depending on
the location of the disassembly facility, transportation
thousands of miles away to Canada, the UK, or China
may be necessary. Because of a robust infrastructure,
metals are the easiest to reprocess. The ferrous metal
scrap is perhaps the easiest and most economical
material to reclaim. Electric arc furnaces are used to melt
and purify steel back into standard lots for sale in commodity markets. Aluminum scrap undergoes a similar
operation resmelting operation in a gas-fired furnace but
requires large amounts of chlorine to purify it before
selling it as a commodity. The recycling process for copper and precious metals requires chemical pre-treatment
9
Again, packaging is an additional category of materials that must
also be managed during computer end-of-life disposition, but we have
omitted it from this discussion.
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C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
and then separation of the copper with arsenic, as well
as additional resmelting to prepare the metals for resale.
Glass and plastics have much more limited recycling
options. The glass in computer monitors is considered
hazardous waste because of its lead content. Because
costs associated with RCRA’s monitoring and recordkeeping requirements have proven prohibitive for
many firms, only a few facilities in the United States
recycle CRT glass. The process of recycling requires
removing the cathode and circuitry from the glass tube,
separating the funnel from the front panel, and then
crushing each. This crushed glass, called cullet, is mixed
with virgin materials during the CRT manufacturing process. Only a small percentage of CRTs in the United
States undergo this process. The reclamation of plastics
is even more problematic and less economically feasible.
Since no human nor technology can identify and costeffectively separate the hundreds of plastics in a typical
shipment of mixed computers, the operating costs for
plastic reprocessing can be difficult to justify in the face
of lower cost virgin plastics and the inferior quality of
recycled ones. If a batch of mixed plastics is of high
enough quality to pass a purity test, it is shredded, magnetically separated from metals, size-reduced, and sorted
according to density. If not, the plastics are burned for
their energy content, used as cheap filler materials in
paving, or landfilled.
The biggest challenges in material reprocessing are
locating markets for materials and determining the
appropriate purity end-point during their reprocessing.
These challenges are highly variable among the
materials in computer products. Infrastructure is relatively well-developed for metals, but glass, plastics, and
hazardous wastes continue to be a disposal concern. Like
disassembly, the reprocessing choices and material output opportunities are highly dependent on choices made
upstream. For example, a decision to operate a material
recovery process with large shredding, grinding, and
sorting machinery changes the purity of the material outputs, since existing technologies are not able to distil all
co-mingled materials cost-effectively. Recovery operations that, alternatively, disassemble and sort products
by hand are sometimes able to separate higher purity
materials, such as aluminum from large structural plates,
than those with automated equipment.
assets in support of forward manufacturing, demanufacturing operates mostly to divert wastes from disposal and
reuse assets wherever practicable. Thus, demanufacturing decreases the likelihood that recovered assets will
repair existing products or can be traced to process
inputs for the production of new ones. Instead, product
assets are commodified and dispersed into other products
or other manufacturing enterprises (e.g., computer circuits being reused in toys; plastics reused in telephones).
Fig. 3 offers an illustration of the difference.
Distinguishing demanufacturing and remanufacturing
as strategies in reverse manufacturing draws a more
complete picture of practices and deepens insights into
the challenges of product recovery for complex goods.
For products with multifarious manufacturing, understanding that products are demanufactured helps to
explain why forward and reverse supply chain organizations are less likely to form relationships: the outputs
from the recovery process do not necessarily become
production inputs for the same products. Although we
cannot refute a charge that demanufacturing may be a
less integrated, and possibly more immature version of
remanufacturing, we also believe that research on product recovery must consider the effects that product
characteristics, ownership patterns, and recovery infrastructure have on strategic choices in reverse manufacturing. Without additional information, we do not suggest that computer recovery will or will not converge on
existing reverse manufacturing models, only that further
research on recovery strategy is needed to understand
the shape that industries take.
3. Description of environmental dimensions of
operational decisions
Product recovery is particularly interesting because of
its potential reduction in end-of-life product, material
2.3. Demanufacturing and remanufacturing
The fundamental difference that we observe between
the experience in computer recovery and existing literature on complex product recovery, is the use of demanufacturing, instead of remanufacturing, as a dominant
strategy. The distinction between remanufacturing and
demanufacturing, which has not been emphasized in the
literature, is a subtle one. As opposed to remanufacturing’s focus on refurbishing products and reclaiming
Fig. 3. Manufacturing strategy.
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
wastes, and energy. However, despite the opportunities
that reverse manufacturing offers, recovery is not an
instant panacea for environmental burdens. Examining
the reverse supply chain from a life cycle perspective
[25,26] reveals that recovery may reduce or delay, but
not eliminate, waste problems and may erode energy
savings if poor planning and techniques are not identified
and corrected. To capture the benefits and avoid the pitfalls, environmental factors must be considered in
decision making and industrial architecture. Although
much work is ongoing to determine how to operate
recovery processes efficiently, little coordinated attention has been paid to designing them environmentally.
In the succeeding paragraphs, we describe the benefits
and drawbacks of reverse manufacturing and begin laying a foundation to study and to mitigate the environmental impacts of its infrastructure.
There are a number of direct and indirect environmental advantages that product recovery can offer over existing extraction and disposal practices. Among other benefits, reusing parts and recycling materials can directly
reduce ecological disturbances from raw material mining
and from waste interment and combustion. That is,
recycling materials to support another generation of
manufacturing can reduce energy demands and prevent
habitat disruption from the production of raw materials.
One study reports that resmelting copper from recovered
circuit boards can reduce the contribution of copper
manufacturing to global warming gas emissions by 40%,
acidifying pollution by 90%, and ground-level smog by
80% [27]. More thorough disposition of electronic products through recovery can also divert heavy metals,
such as lead, cadmium, and mercury, away from landfills
or incinerators and, thereby, prevent their leaching into
the groundwater or dispersion into the air. In addition to
these direct improvements, reverse manufacturing carries the indirect benefit of creating learning opportunities
to improve the environmental benignity of products. For
example, the need to simplify the removal and reuse of
assets in end-of-life computer equipment has encouraged
computer equipment designers to develop designs that
facilitate computer disassembly and improve upgradability. It is possible that, as they become more experienced with these kinds of DfE, designers will find it easier and more natural to make changes that improve other
environmental attributes of computers, such as product
energy efficiency.
Enumerating the benefits of reverse manufacturing
demonstrates its superiority to extraction and disposal,
but does not tell the whole story. The developing recovery infrastructure for computers, particularly in the face
of a global electronics manufacturing industry, has
potential environmental consequences as well. In the first
part of this paper we described the stages in reverse
manufacturing and some of their principal operational
challenges. In this section, we revisit those stages with
455
a discussion of primary environmental risks and possible
process improvements.
3.1. Product recovery is energy-intensive
Naturally, recovering products and product assets
requires energy, but inattention to the amount or kind of
energy used can erode potential environmental savings
from recovery. This point is particularly salient for product acquisition. Input management raises two important
questions: which products to collect, and where to process them. In the face of a computer and electronics
industry that is increasing global, geographically dispersed computers collected from offices or curbsides
could travel thousands of miles across the country or
overseas in search of cheaper factors of recovery, such as
labor rates or browner jurisdictions. Allowing computer
products to circumnavigate the globe to capitalize on low
costs almost certainly means relying on heavily polluting
shipping networks, the global transport backbone for
low-value goods like recyclable materials. The large
amounts of vehicle fuel consumed to support extensive
shipment will fail to capture much of the environmental
savings from recovery, instead contributing to air quality
and climate change problems. The concern is that it
could still look ‘optimal’ from a cost standpoint.
When computing the centralized or decentralized
locations of processing facilities within a recovery network, optimization algorithms include the transportation
costs as a program constraint but may overlook environmental costs, which are externalized from market prices
for vehicle fuels. Models not explicitly correcting these
market failures by including constraints for energetic and
atmospheric impact offer environmentally suboptimal
solutions. Explicit inclusion of environmental hazards
into decision models is needed to create network designs
that mitigate the deleterious impacts of product acquisition. Initial optimization studies have attempted to consider these factors for curbside collection of household
waste [28] and for electronics recovery networks within
Germany [29] but not for a global electronics supply
chain. The novel approach of these studies is to focus
on maximizing energy efficiency or minimizing environmental impacts. Continued network modeling should follow these examples.
In comparison to collection and transportation, disassembly and reprocessing activities are likely to have less
substantial energy impacts but may still rely heavily on
unsustainable fossil fuels. More energy efficient and
green energy solutions will be needed to mitigate their
energy and atmospheric impacts as well.
3.2. Computer reverse manufacturing still produces
solid waste
One manager overseeing a processing facility, which
collects, disassembles, and separates computer assets as
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C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
part of an OEM warranty program, praised reverse
manufacturing for its dual improvement of the bottom
line and elimination of solid wastes sent to landfill. To
paraphrase the manager—everything that cannot be
resold is recycled; nothing goes into a landfill. This
enthusiasm and optimism is admirable, but the claim
overlooks the broader picture. After initial collection,
assessment, and processing, a substantial amount of parts
and materials, such as the computer monitors this manager’s facility was not handling, are discarded as solid
or hazardous wastes during subsequent stages of disassembly and material reprocessing. The fate of plastics
best demonstrates this supply loop failure.
Like glass, low-quality metals, and packaging
materials, plastics reprocessed after computer recovery
are often not competitive with often cheaper or higher
quality virgin materials. In some cases, the lower quality
of recycled plastics is driven by the method of disassembly and separation. A firm that we visited shredded
and separated materials with the primary intention of
recovering higher value metals and, in the process,
treated plastics as byproducts. Because separating comingled plastics is expensive, if not impossible, the
firm’s only alternative to burning or landfilling mixed
plastics was recycling them into low-property, amalgamated products, such as plastic lumber or pavement
filler. (They chose to burn them.) Even though recycling
into plastic lumber could have prevented immediate disposal, such low-grade applications have limited marketable uses, are likely to saturate the marketplace rapidly,
and propel all computer plastics toward their original
fate: becoming garbage sent to landfills or incinerators.
Overcoming these problems requires multiple
changes. Foremost, markets for recycled materials need
to be improved and expanded. Transferring subsidies
from raw material production to material reprocessing
can level the playing field and at least allow recycled
materials to come closer to competing with their virgin
counterparts. Additionally, technology research and
development is needed. For computer plastics, no recycling machinery, human eye, nor combination of the two
is capable of sorting mixed computer plastics into pure
streams [30]. This problem could be corrected by standardizing and limiting the variety of plastics in computers, but this solution has generally been discouraged
by OEMs, who believe that external appearance strongly
affects branding and sales. An alternative approach is to
label plastics with their formulations, but this suggestion
raises proprietary concerns about trade secrets or exclusive recipes. These desires to control information and to
foster product loyalty become obstacles to sustainable
production and recovery.
3.3. Reverse manufacturing does not itself instill
responsible production or recovery
The development of reverse manufacturing capacity
and the participation in DFE activities by some OEMs
has made substantial improvements in products, but
these efforts offer no guarantee that all computer manufacturers will behave similarly. The fear is that, in the
face of free riding opportunities and other perverse
incentives, product recovery may ‘greenwash’ environmentally unsound or other undesirable practices. For
example, manufacturers may overlook opportunities to
replace harmful or costly substances because recycling
may avoid landfill bans or allow them to pass along the
costs of intensive material reprocessing to the consumer.
In this sense, reverse manufacturing could contribute to
a slowdown in environmental progress by reducing
pressure on computer manufacturers to use more
environmentally friendly designs. However, the biggest
problem, as described repeatedly, is the need for information to facilitate recovery. Without knowledge of product design and composition, recovery is slower, more
expensive, and sometimes abandoned in favor of disposal. To solve this problem common to recovery for all
products, scholars have suggested increasing information
availability by establishing clearinghouses or consortia
[24].
3.4. Remanufacturing and recycling do not promote
responsible consumption
The absence of recovery infrastructure is not the ultimate cause of the world’s growing waste disposal woes.
Consumption of durable goods as disposable products is.
In America, where only 1% of materials are retained in
durable goods for more than six months [31], product
recovery does not discourage the overwhelming propensity to discard goods after extremely short life cycles. In
fact, it may enable it if consumers believe that recycling
lessens or eliminates environmental harms. The potential
‘rebound effect’ is that, mollified by the notion that
recycling abates the harm of discarding goods, people
will increase their consumption rates—buying two or
three products in the period in which they previously
would have bought just one. Because current free market
accounting practices and economic growth hegemonies
reinforce this disposable consumption, reliance on product recovery, without policies to encourage responsible
consumption, could actually exacerbate unsustainable
material and energy use patterns.
4. Conclusions
Previous research has laid a foundation for understanding reverse manufacturing for some products, but
has focused mostly on recovery to remanufacture products and parts for reuse. Complex goods with less
opportunity for reuse, such as computer products, are
less capable of remanufacture than some other goods.
As a result, they are not remanufactured so much as
demanufactured to recover valuable assets wherever and
C.D. White et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 11 (2003) 445–458
however possible. It is with the goal of describing recovery infrastructure more completely that we have used our
understanding of remanufacturing and demanufacturing
to present the generalized overview of a reverse manufacturing process for computers (see Fig. 2). We have
also described in some detail important aspects and challenges in the acquisition, assessment, disassembly and
reprocessing of computer equipment as it moves through
this reverse manufacturing process.
A great deal of additional research is needed to help
managers in the industry’s reverse supply chains optimize the recovery of materials. Demanufacturing offers
different incentives and challenges for product recovery
from remanufacturing. Our field research and review of
the existing literature on current practices reveals that
many challenges must be overcome to realize the full
potential of product recovery for moving toward more
sustainable business. More complete information about
product design, composition, quality, quantity, and timing is needed to improve end-of-life opportunities. This
will require producer and consumer disclosures about
when and how products are made and used. To generate
these data, a general reexamination of notions about proprietary information in consumption and production, and
suggestions of new responsibilities for product management in industrialized society, is needed.
The risks as well as the potential are great. Product
recovery offers opportunities to reduce environmental
problems associated with electronic solid waste, but it
also has shortfalls. Reverse manufacturing can be
energy-intensive and may fail to prevent disposal unless
reuse and recycling opportunities are expanded, particularly for materials like glass, plastics, and hazardous
substances. Although product recovery raises awareness
and offers solutions to a particular environmental concerns, on its own it does not correct problems associated
with unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.
In the face of these limitations, one might ask, “if
reverse manufacturing is the answer, what was the question?” The question is how to make industrialization
more sustainable. In the case of mitigating electronic
wastes, the most prudent approach is to extend computer
life cycles by designing more durable products. In contrast to the practices currently followed in the reverse
supply chain, developing longer-lasting, more reusable,
and more upgradable products would reduce the energy
and material demands of the entire industrial process
more than breaking them down into their constituent
parts and rebuilding them again. This suggestion, frequently advanced in DFE literature, reaches far beyond
simply improving reverse manufacturing as a process. It
involves a reprioritization of consumption and production practices, which lacks political leadership at the
national level in the US and appears left for private
actors or other levels of government to undertake. It is
457
for these actors that our study helps to consolidate existing knowledge, highlight environmental aspects at each
stage of product recovery, and lay a foundation for an
impact model to support environmental planning for the
overall process. Further research like this is needed to
ensure that reverse manufacturing not only becomes
more efficient from a managerial perspective, but also
solves waste problems rather than simply rearranging
environmental burdens.
Appendix A
Glossary
Recovery: often dubbed recycling in lay conversation,
product recovery describes the broad set of activities
designed to reclaim value from a product at end of life.
An analog to production, this set of activities includes
both reuse and recycling. In addition to reclaiming
materials for recycling, recovery also extracts information, refurbishes parts, or remanufactures whole products for reuse. We use this term interchangeably with
‘reverse manufacturing’.
Reverse Manufacturing: activities designed to reuse,
recover, refurbish, remanufacture, demanufacture, or
recycle durable product assets at the end of a product
life-cycle. Reverse manufacturing is a complementary
term to ‘forward manufacturing’, which describes the
activities traditionally used to bring a product to market.
We use this term as a synonym for ‘recovery’.
Remanufacturing: a recovery strategy focusing on
refurbishing products or reconditioning components to
rebuild products in their original design.
Demanufacturing: a recovery strategy that focuses on
reclamation of product assets as a diversionary tactic
to avoid disposal. Assets are recovered and reused
wherever possible without the explicit intention of
rebuilding products in their original designs.
Acquisition: the first stage in the recovery process, in
which product types are selected and products are
located, collected, and transported to facilities for
reverse manufacturing.
Assessment: the second stage in the recovery process
where input products are appraised and process outputs
are chosen.
Disassembly: the third stage in the recovery process, in
which products are physically taken apart for repair,
refurbishment, reconditioning, or recycling.
Disaggregation: careful disassembly that retain design
value of the product and all of its components.
Dismantling: disassembly that retains the design value
of some components but destroys others.
Demolition: disassembly that destroys all design
value.
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Reprocessing: the separation of product assets to facilitate their recycling.
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