Assessing barriers for available life-cycle information feedback transfer to product design

The design of products greatly influences the performance of the product in the rest of the product’s life-cycle phases, e.g. manufacturing, use/maintenance and end-of-life processes. In order to design more sustainable products, information from all life-cycle phases should be implemented in structured ways via e.g. eco-design tools in the design process. Remanufacturing is one viable end-of-life strategy that is environmentally beneficial as it will preserve most of the material and energy put into the initial product and/or its components. Although the product design determines a large portion of the remanufacturability of a product, few companies apply design for remanufacturing on their products. The aim of this paper is to show what type of feedback is available at remanufacturers, and to explore the barriers that prevent that feedback from reaching product development. Using the case study methodology, data have been collected through semi-structured interviews with four remanufacturing companies focusing on the information exchange between the departments of remanufacturing and product development. The case study results show that there is feedback from the remanufacturers concerning a wide variety of design aspects. Furthermore, the remanufacturers have feedback about information they lack from design and the use phase including service. At present, however, there is no feedback provided from remanufacturing to design in the cases studied. Thus, the barriers for providing available life-cycle information feedback are assessed. There are both internal and external barriers. Between design and remanufacturing the barriers include e.g. lack of knowledge and organisational aspects. Further influencing the lack of feedback are managerial aspects such as the business case and specifications lacking remanufacturing aspects and thus not supporting design for remanufacturing. However, design changes such as different joining methods, a higher degree of standardization and different material selections could be very beneficial for remanufacturing and thus the environment.