Assessment of Products Future Reusability Based on Consumers Usage Behavior: Implications for Lithium-Ion Laptop Batteries

Abstract

Product reuse is a recommended action toward sustainability. However, the profitable reusability of End-of-Use or End-of-Life (EoU/L) products depends on how consumers have used them over the initial lifecycles and what are their EoU conditions. In addition to consumers’ behavior, product design features such as product durability has an impact on the future reusability. In this paper, a data set of Lithium-ion laptop batteries has been studied with the aim of investigating the potential reusability of laptop batteries. This type of rechargeable batteries is popular due to their energy efficiency and high reliability. Therefore, understanding the lifetime of these batteries and improving the recycling process is becoming important. In this paper, the reusability assessment is linked to the consumer behavior and degradation process simultaneously through monitoring the performance of batteries over their lifetimes. After capturing the utilization behavior, the performance-based stability time of batteries is approximately derived. Consequently, the Reusability Likelihood of batteries is quantified using the number of cycles that the battery can be charged with the aim of facilitating future remarketing and recovery opportunities.