The optimal product disposition decision for product returns towards sustainable manufacturing

Due to the substantial growth of used product disposal and recovery, product remanufacturing has drawn significant attention by many practitioners in the last two decades. One of the major concerns is the feasibility for product recovery, which is to meet the stringent worldwide environmental requirements. In recent years, product recovery is considered as one of the appropriate approaches for achieving efficient and effective post-use life management. However, producers have to examine and determine optimal recovery plan, which is to maximise the recovery value for a remanufactured product in order to gain significant financial and environmental sustainability. This article presents a decision disposition model to examine two types of the proposed recovery configuration selections to make the comparisons of their possible recovery utilisation value of a remanufactured product. In this study, an optimization model is developed and solved using binary programming. The results obtained for numerical application in product recovery plan showed that the proposed Type-II remanufactured product with base parts to be remanufactured is practically more desirable than the Type-I remanufactured product with base part to be de-manufactured via recycling. © 2016, International Association of Engineers. All rights reserved.