ABSTRACT
Is ‘waste-free’ a metaphor? Or is it a slogan? In the early 1990s, Xerox Corporation made a commitment to become a waste-free company, leading to programmes that reduce waste during manufacture, use and at the end-of-life of products. Xerox has now become a leader in remanufacturing, an industrial process in which a discarded product is disassembled, its re-usable parts cleaned, refurbished and put into new products. Such labour-intensive remanufacturing uses one-fifth of the energy and one-tenth of the raw materials needed to manufacture a totally new product.
