Planning end-of-life management within the product design process

Product end-of-life management is a growing problem in all industrialised countries. The progressive shortening of the effective useful life as a result of technological obsolescence causes serious difficulties in ensuring adequate forms of disposal for the millions of products disposed each year. To date, two different approaches have been applied separately. On the one hand, disassembly and re-cycling technologies have been developed which are used when the product reaches the end of its useful life, while on the other, Design for Disassembly (DfD) and Design for Recycling (DfR) techniques have sought to provide features as early as the design phase which make it easier to dispose of or re-cycle products. Unfortunately a lack of consistence between disassembly/recyclability properties of products and actual end-of-life processes still be. The present paper describes and tests a new technique (ProEM -ProductEnd-of-Lfe Management Planning) for product end-oflife management planning from the design phase. Using an economic assessment model, ProEM identifies whether recycling/ re-use or disposal would be the preferable strategy by comparing the costs and earnings of re-cycling after disassembly with the cost of disposal in controlled tips. The validity of the model is tested in a case study of a refrigerator design based on DID techniques already introduced by the company.