Sustainability Indicators System for Remanufacturing

Legal regulations enforce the companies to search for the ways to reuse their end-of-use or end-of-life products. Additionally, more and more companies start to perceive the closing of the life cycles loops as an additional area of income. Remanufacturing facilitates multiple usage of the value-added from new production by several life cycles. It helps to reduce work effort and energy and it has big potential for cost savings. There is a research gap regarding the assessment of remanufacturing operational excellence. The application of the principles of sustainable development in everyday business operations is problematic, as there is a lack of the clearly defined sustainability indicators, which might be used in the assessment of remanufacturing activities. The majority of the companies which are involved in the remanufacturing operations are small and medium sized (SME). Very often operations in these companies are organized by rule-of-thumbs. The aim of this chapter is to provide sustainability assessment framework so called Sustainability Indicators System for Remanufacturing (SISR) based on the literature review and remanufacturing process characteristics revealed from case studies.