Chapter 6: Sustainability

Title: Development of cost index model for recycling in end-of-life management

Author(s): Wen F. Lu, Baofeng Hew

Address: Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive, 117576, Singapore | Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive, 117576, Singapore

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2009 pp. 290 - 301

Abstract/Summary: With the concept of PLM, there is a need for a method to analyze cost of recycling that can directly relate to product design, material characteristic and operating conditions for end-of-life management. This allows decision maker to understand the impact of product variations and process variations on the total recycling cost when the process is implemented. This paper proposes an improved methodology on deriving the total cost of recycling end-of-life products. As real cost of materials and operations might be difficult to obtain, cost index for recycling end-of-life product is used to replace the actual cost. The cost index is built up using appropriate ranking system and weighting factors according to recycling processes and parameters. To illustrate the proposed methodology, one case study in the development of the cost index for recycling a scrapped aluminum plate is presented. This aluminum plate can be used as a reference part to compare with the cost index with other recycled objects.

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