Abstract
Through the extension of product life, remanufacturing contributes to sustainability, saving energy and materials, and reducing waste and emissions. Today, the application of remanufacturing has far from reached its potential, and it is only common in specific industrial fields and geographic areas. In Finland the awareness of the concept and the potential is low and the implementation is at a low level even if some companies have identified its business benefits. To advance remanufacturing, better understanding is needed about the benefits, challenges and practices as well as how the remanufacturing system could be built. Networking is important to Finnish companies in new product manufacturing and even more in remanufacturing as additional activities and actors are needed. Different forms of networking may be needed in different cases. Thus, based on the results of a Finnish research project, this paper discusses the types of enterprise collaboration in remanufacturing. Additionally, sustainability assessment of remanufacturing is discussed to understand the benefits. Both the topics relate to the main research question of the project: “How remanufacturing could be applied and promoted in Finnish industry?” The study uses information collected from Finnish industry and cases described in literature. Actors needed in a remanufacturing system are identified and a scheme for a classification for collaboration network types is presented. Assessment of sustainability of remanufacturing is discussed through a case study.
Highlights
The Finnish national research funding organization Tekes [1] manages the research programme Green Growth
Remanufacturing barriers identified by Finnish companies Even if remanufacturing is widespread in a few limited fields or geographical areas, it is a small-scale activity in others
The companies experienced a need for resources and knowledge when developing new remanufacturing processes: technical information and test specifications are needed, and the products should be better designed for reuse and remanufacturing
Summary
The Finnish national research funding organization Tekes [1] manages the research programme Green Growth. The aim of the programme is “to identify potential new growth areas for the sustainable economy business, which are essentially based on lower energy consumption and sustainable use of natural resources”. In 2012, the project DemaNET was started within Green Growth. DemaNET comes from ‘Dematerialization and Sustainable Competitiveness through New Models for Industrial Networking’. One of the focus areas of the project was remanufacturing. The others included strategic ecoindustrial networks and sustainable business models. This paper addresses the remanufacturing focus area and collaboration forms and sustainability assessment
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