Product Modularity and Implications for the Reverse Supply Chain

Abstract

Modularity has been widely used and studied in industry and academia. Modular products consist of detachable modules that can be manufactured, assembled, and serviced separately. Some module components (or overall modules themselves) can be reusable, recyclable, or remanufacturable after reaching the end of their original life cycle.The reverse supply chain represents all operations related to reuse of products, components, and their materials. Recently, environmental issues including energy usage and the carbon footprint (CF) implications of products have attracted attention. Thus, designing product modular architectures that consider not only the interactions across components but also component end-of-life (EOL) options (i.e., reuse, recycle, and disposal) has become important. In this article, we compare results of two modularity methods for their CF implications. The environmental impact (i.e., CF generation during assembly or manufacturing) was analyzed by dissecting a refrigerator and using SimaPro software for the recovered data. Significantly, a new factor—the carbon footprint—is introduced into the analysis of modularization comparisons. We discuss the implications of the differences in terms of CF for the reverse supply chain.