Remanufacturing: regenerate industrial products and components to be considered as new

Remanufacturing or regeneration is the sum of activities aimed at recovery, dismantling, repair, sanitization of the good that, for quality, performance and durability can be compared to a new element. The regeneration of the components or part of them, during production, allows to contribute to the circular economy through the increase in the life of the elements, saving raw materials.

The world economy has gone through several phases of approach to production, from the linear economy where the concept of “raw-production-waste” was used, to the circular economy in which a system of recovery and treatment of waste has been adopted to get it back to raw material.

Industry has been able to increase productivity by working on raw material cost and labour costs, through processes of industrial automation, new technologies and management techniques.

With a view to globalization of the markets,margins on certain product ranges can, over time, be reduced by the achievement of good material and labour productivity performance by competitors.

With the aim of finding new compensation spaces on finished products, the concept of circular economy, which is widely used in other non-complex manufacturing sectors, has been seen as a necessity by industries that make compound products to find new ways.

But in the automotive, space, military industries and in other production groups where the final asset is made from a set of thousands or tens of thousands of pieces, the application of the concept of circular economy that is easily used, for example on a bottle of detergent to be recycled, was a difficult concept to manage.

The industry has thus begun to consider the concept of remanufacturing, which consists of recovering used durable products, dismantling them, repairing them, sanitizing and testing them,applying the process to as many components as possible recovered from a complex product, so that they can be used again in production with the same quality, performance and durability as a new one.

While until now the concept of circular economy has been applied mainly on simple products such as paper, plastic, glass, metals and wood,reaching encouraging recycling rates, complex product cores, such as a machine, do not enjoy the same automatic recycling.

Remanufacturing is an activity that promises great expansions and is suitable for industries that produce durable, capital-intensive products and with a fairly long life cycle, such as the automotive, space, rail, machinery, electronics, electromedical, PC peripherals, mobile, to name just a few.

Renault,at its Choisy-leRoi plant, reconstructs the engines of the cars and many accessories connected to it, through a network of companies active in the recovery of automotive components. The most important of them is the Indra company, which in France operates about 400 breakers working about 100,000 cars a year with a recycling rate of 95.

BMW has set up a specialist company, Encory,which advises on remanufactoring.

Bosh has implemented a program called the Bosh Exchange,which aims to reduce the supply of used raw materials and market a range of recycled and guaranteed products.

Germany’s Knorr Bremse sells refurbished braking systems.

In aerospace, Airbus is able to recover and recycle about 90 of the components of its aircraft.

The camera and office industry sees Canon engaged in the recovery of its used products, regenerating them into high-quality products, using them again in a percentage close to 80.

The advantages of the supply chain can be summarized here:

Manufacturers

With a circular economy required by customers, large manufacturers such as Genaral Elettric, Boeing, Caterpillar, Deere, Navistrar, Xerox and sides have created business models in which the asset regeneration component is an integral part of the business strategy. To a lesser extent, the automotive industry is also taking this path, probably driven more by a need for marketing than by budgetary advantages.

Consumers

The cost of selling an asset where recycled components were used normally leads to a lower price. Especially in the car parts of discontinued models allows you to have efficient and proven parts. The same can happen with the components of office machines, for example for refurbished cartridges.

The consumer is increasingly attentive to the environmental aspect caused by the production and disposal of the products they buy or use, so they tend to select companies that follow the concepts of the circular economy to contribute to the well-being of the environment.

The company

Among the three subjects we are analyzing, that of society is the area where you can see the greatest benefits by adopting remanufactoring practices.

The benefits can be assessed not only directly on the product, through the analysis of the reduction of energy consumption to produce it, but also on the saving of raw materials of natural origin.

Lower energy consumption directly corresponds to lower emissions into the atmosphere with an impact on the health of all citizens.

With regard to the raw materials used for production, the start of the process of making an asset from a refurbished piece rather than raw material, allows a lightening of the pressure of the waste produced and an improvement of general environmental conditions.

Another important aspect to consider is that remanufacturing activities cannot be highly robotic and, therefore, a specialized workforce within the processes is required. This means, at a time when the advent of artificial intelligence is diminishing jobs, to allow the return to the factory or the recruitment of highly manual figures.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.