Effective use of resources in closed value networks

Currently, almost 60 billion tons of commodities are consumed worldwide each year. The effective use of resources is, therefore, an important key factor for sustainable development. Integrating recovered material at the end of the product’s utilization phase into an existing production network can make a significant contribution to the effective use of resources. This paper proposes a methodology to manage inventory levels in order to enable the direct reuse of products considering reverse material flows in the calculations.