Evaluation of product recyclability at the product design phase: a time-series forecasting methodology

Abstract

Nowadays, the society is paying more and more attention to the issues that plague the environment. There is a growing need for enterprises to design and manufacture environmentally friendly products, in order to take up the responsibility of sustainable development of the society. The entire product life cycle consists of design, manufacturing, usage and recycling phases. These phases involve various economic and environmental factors that affect the recyclability of products. Previous researchers mainly focused on the single phase of the product’s life cycle. Moreover, they did not take into account the dynamic change of the recyclable material’s cost. In this paper, a time-series forecasting methodology is proposed to evaluate the product’s recyclability at the product design phase. It considers various economic and environmental factors of different stages of the product’s life cycle. In addition, a time-series forecasting method is utilised for predicting the cost of the recycled material at the product’s end-of-life. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, a case study of a cylinder engine design was presented. The results showed that the proposed methodology was fully capable of providing decision support to the designers by accessing the recyclability of the product at the design phase.

Keywords:

• recyclability
• index
• end-of-life
• time-series forecasting
• product design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://ltfzs.mofcom.gov.cn/article/ztzzn/an/201605/20160501325666.shtml.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [51405089 and 71601052], Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province [2015B010131008], China Postdoctoral Scientific Foundation [2017M612621], and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of CIMS [CIMSOF2016009].