Enhancing remanufacturing – studying networks and sustainability to support Finnish industry

Karvonen et al. Journal of Remanufacturing (2015) 5:5 DOI 10.1186/s13243-015-0015-6 RESEARCH Open Access Enhancing remanufacturing – studying networks and sustainability to support Finnish industry Iris Karvonen*, Kim Jansson, Hannele Tonteri, Saija Vatanen and Mikko Uoti * Correspondence: Iris.Karvonen@vtt. fi VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, P.O. Box 1000, Espoo 02044 VTT, Finland 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. Keywords: Remanufacturing; Life cycle thinking; Remanufacturing networks; Collaboration; Sustainability evaluation Background 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 specifically collaboration forms and sustainability assessment. The aim of the DemaNET project was to study how new sustainable concepts like remanufacturing can be applied and promoted in the Finnish manufacturing industry, what the barriers are and how they can be overcome, and what kind of networking and © 2015 Karvonen et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Karvonen et al. Journal of Remanufacturing (2015) 5:5 collaboration is needed to achieve the business and sustainability targets. The sustainability assessment in the transformation is also discussed to identify applicability of the concept in different cases. Ten industrial companies with an interest in sustainability, some specifically in the remanufacturing business, participated in the project. The companies mainly operate in the business-to-business field. They are currently at different stages of development: some already active, some just starting or planning. Additionally information from a larger group was collected through a survey. Chapter 2 describes previous research on remanufacturing and its challenges, collaboration networks and sustainability assessment in remanufacturing. Chapter 3 presents the research approach used in the study. Chapter 4 summarizes the results. First the remanufacturing barriers as identified by the Finnish industry are shortly reviewed. The collaboration forms are analysed through the identification of different actors needed in the remanufacturing process and a classification outline for remanufacturing networks is presented. Finally experience from a sustainability assessment use case is reported. Chapter 5 contains the conclusions and way forward. Overview of previous research on remanufacturing, collaboration networks and sustainability Remanufacturing Remanufacturing is one form of product end-of-life strategies, often called 6R: reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, redesign, remanufacture [2]. Remanufacturing can be seen as the ultimate form of recycling: it reuses more of the assets put into a product or component than recycling. In recycling, large amounts of energy and labour are lost [3]. Through remanufacturing, materials and energy can be saved and less waste is produced. The idea is not to refit the product or product part for the same user but systematically to take back end-of- life goods and reuse them or their components for new users. There are several definitions of remanufacturing, for example: “recycling by manufacturing ‘good as new’ products from used products” [4]. “the process of restoring a non-functional, discarded, or traded-in product to like-new condition” [5]. Recently, “circular economy”, defined as “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design” [3], has attracted increasing interest in industry and society. A circular economy is not based on consumption but on restorative use. Remanufacturing can be considered one route for a circular economy. Remanufacturing has been performed in some form for decades, but as an industrial activity it is mainly well known in specific industrial fields and a few geographical areas. Examples of successful cases can be found in literature, for example [6]. In Finnish industry and society, awareness of remanufacturing and its potential is low. Remanufacturing is referred to as a “win-win-win” situation: the customers pay less for the remanufactured products or components, remanufacturing companies earn more and the environment benefits [7]. As a whole, remanufacturing contributes to all three dimensions of sustainability (environment, economy, society): It saves material Page 2 of 16 Karvonen et al. Journal of Remanufacturing (2015) 5:5 and energy resources, reduces waste and landfill, creates skilled jobs and produces substantial savings for the customers. Lund and Hauser [5] identify (...truncated)