Remanufacturing and Energy Savings
Name
REMANandENERGY.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.63 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
53f7fdac31ad59abf014573eaf7eaf50
Author(s)
Gutowski, Timothy G
Sahni, Sahil
Boustani, Avid
Graves, Stephen C
Date Issued
May 15, 2011
Journal
Environmental Science & Technology
Publisher
American Chemical Society
Citation
Gutowski, Timothy G., et al. "Remanufacturing and Energy Savings." Environmental Science & Technology 45 10 (2011): 4540-47.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Remanufactured products that can substitute for new products are generally claimed to save energy. These claims are made from studies that look mainly at the differences in materials production and manufacturing. However, when the use phase is included, the situation can change radically. In this Article, 25 case studies for eight different product categories were studied, including: (1) furniture, (2) clothing, (3) computers, (4) electric motors, (5) tires, (6) appliances, (7) engines, and (8) toner cartridges. For most of these products, the use phase energy dominates that for materials production and manufacturing combined. As a result, small changes in use phase efficiency can overwhelm the claimed savings from materials production and manufacturing. These use phase energy changes are primarily due to efficiency improvements in new products, and efficiency degradation in remanufactured products. For those products with no, or an unchanging, use phase energy requirement, remanufacturing can save energy. For the 25 cases, we found that 8 cases clearly saved energy, 6 did not, and 11 were too close to call. In some cases, we could examine how the energy savings potential of remanufacturing has changed over time. Specifically, during times of significant improvements in energy efficiency, remanufacturing would often not save energy. A general design trend seems to be to add power to a previously unpowered product, and then to improve on the energy efficiency of the product over time. These trends tend to undermine the energy savings potential of remanufacturing.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/es102598b
