Assessing the remanufacturability of office furniture: a multi-criteria decision making approach

Abstract

While the average life cycle of consumer goods is continuously decreasing, the amounts of used products at their end-of-life (EOL) is accumulating proportionally fast. Remanufacturing is one of the EOL strategies which is highly environmentally friendly. The selling price of remanufactured products is usually about 50—80% of a new one depending on the quality, making remanufacturing a win—win solution. The goal of this exploratory research is to present the first framework of its kind that aims at assessing the remanufacturability of office furniture. The proposed evaluation model considers three aspects of the assessment problem: economic, social and environmental to obtain a holistic view of the remanufacturability of office furniture. We apply the fuzzy TOPSIS methodology to deal with incomplete and often subjective information during the evaluation process. Furthermore, we validate our evaluation model using published research data for a multi-criteria allocation decision making (MCDM) problem. Through the validation results, we show that the proposed evaluation model has the capability to solve MCDM problems. Lastly, a case study which involves three pieces of office furniture is used to illustrate the application of the proposed model.