ABSTRACT
Consumers’ ever growing appetite to acquire new products and their short courtship with them has kept the manufacturers busy expending our virgin resources at an alarming rate. This has led to serious depletion of these resources and given rise to increasing amounts of waste and pollution. The traditional way of manufacturing where we use only virgin materials to produce new products and dispose of the used products at the end of their lives, is unsustainable. Many countries and their governments have started to realize this problem and have imposed strict regulations, some of which require the manufacturers to take back their products when products reach the end of their lives. According to these regulations, the collected end-oflife (EOL) products must also be processed in an environmentally friendly manner. This has forced manufacturers to establish dedicated facilities for product recovery that involve the minimization of waste amounts sent to land€lls by recovering parts and materials from EOL products via remanufacturing and recycling.
