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Product Acquisition from Waste Streams

Objective



Objectives and content

A key issue in the long term for manufacturing companies is to include resource recovery in their logistics chain. This suggests the take back of product at the end of life to re-use or recycle. However, the basic principles of costing, logistics and quality assessment of discarded goods are not at all understood. Current industrial research focuses mainly on design for material reclamation and disassembly.

This research is necessary to reduce the costs incurred with the environmental requirements. In the long term, a substantial contribution can be made by developing new industries and markets for the re-use and refurbishment of products, rather than parts reclamation and waste disposal. Concepts such as secondary sourcing, end-of-life-cycle maintenance of product, which are currently very expensive for manufacturers, will typically be taken over by new SMEs, in partnerships with the original manufacturers. Issues for these new industries will include reverse supply chains, forecasting, product and process costing, financing structures, stocking policies, customer service, tracking & tracing, and environment. Neither the business concepts nor the information systems for these industries are available at present. PAWS will therefore focus on these issues, rather than design for recycling, which is covered by other projects. The first industrial objective of this project is to provide industry with an understanding of resource recovery in terms of business models and objectives.

Through case studies, PAWS will develop a typology for resource recovery and business models for each type in the typology. The second industrial objective of the project is to provide industry with the concepts needed to develop information systems that support resource recovery as part of the mainstream information systems for product development, production and distribution control. PAWS will develop prototype systems with the user companies in the consortium, in both electronics and automotive industry to test and validate the business models.

The results of PAWS will be initially be exploited and disseminated through papers and workshops. Ultimately, the results will become available in a new generation of information systems for planning and control of production, distribution and recycling of the software house involved in PAWS, with at present a customer base of circa 1200 industrial companies in Europe, of which over 80% are SMEs.

Call for proposal

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Coordinator

Eindhoven University of Technology
EU contribution
No data
Address
2,Den Dolech
5600 MB Eindhoven
Netherlands

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Total cost
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Participants (6)