Texas A&M University

It Is Easy Being Green By Adam Dziedzic and LEsley V. Kriewald

There’s more to recycling a cell phone than putting it out by the curb on collection day. Texas A&M engineers are working to make product recycling and remanufacturing more efficient.

Sila Çetinkaya and Halit Üster
Graduate student Gopalakrishnan Easwaran (left) joins associate professor Sila Çetinkaya and assistant professor Halit Üster. Çetinkaya and Üster design networks that gets products from one group of consumers who no longer need or want them to another group of consumers who do.

Last year’s cell phone. A disposable camera. Used auto parts.

These things, among others, share a common fate, and it’s not shared space in your local landfill.

They’re all things that can be reused, recycled or remanufactured, but getting the stuff from the consumer who no longer wants or needs it to the next consumer who does is tricky business.

That’s where Sila Çetinkaya and Halit Üster in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering come in.

The two specialize in supply chain management, controlling inventory from the manufacturing stage through distribution and into retail stores or dealerships.

“The textbook definition of supply chain management is delivering the right product to the right customer at the right time and the right price,” Çetinkaya says. “But it’s also managing the financial flows throughout the process, not just the flow of physical goods.”

Supply chain management is a forward network, Üster says. The reverse — getting goods from the customers back to manufacturers — is called closed-loop supply chain management. It’s a relatively new trend in supply chain management that focuses on “green manufacturing” to target recycling, recovery and remanufacturing systems to reuse many products that consumers no longer want.

In these reverse networks consumers bring products to a retailer or a collection center. Depending on the particular product, it can be refurbished, remanufactured or recycled. Making sure the physical flow is efficient, Üster says, involves designing the network as well as production planning and inventory control. Mathematical models help to decide which retailer sends what product to which collection center and where the facilities need to be located for optimum efficiency.

So what happens to last year’s cell phone when you upgrade to this year’s model?

Cell phones can be returned to the store where the new one is purchased. From there, the phones are resold and reused in other countries where the technology that is being phased out in the United States is just being introduced.

What about that used-up printer cartridge?

Users typically ship those directly to a collection center where they’re sent on to be refilled and resold. And those disposable cameras you turn in to be developed are similarly reusable; those are designed to be used seven or eight times, Çetinkaya says.

And that faulty transmission that’s still under warranty?

When you take it in for repair, chances are it’s being replaced with a refurbished transmission from another facility. Then your faulty transmission is itself collected, repaired and redistributed to eventually replace someone else’s buggy transmission.

Closed-loop supply chain management is driven by changing customers, says Elif Akçali, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who is collaborating with Üster and Çetinkaya on their National Science Foundation-funded closed-loop supply chain management work.

In the past, consumers bought a product and used it until it stopped working. Now, new models of many products are available every year and consumers want the latest model.

These changing consumer behaviors also increase the life span of tech products, currently very short, comparatively. Take cell phones, for instance. Consumers often exchange their cell phones annually to upgrade to the newest models, but last year’s model may find a new life overseas in developing countries where it can be resold at lower costs to second consumers. Many other products have the potential for second use, including computers, auto parts, printer cartridges, refillable containers and a host of other possibilities.

And increasing the life span of tech products means less solid waste in landfills and fewer pollutants emitted from first-time manufacturing systems, Akçali says. Making use of refillable containers such as glass bottles and print cartridges, and reusable materials such as tires and paper, is a viable alternative to landfill dumping.

Product reuse can also mean saving money. Çetinkaya says consumers notice 30 percent to 40 percent decreases in the final price of the reconditioned products. But these lower prices on remanufactured or refurbished products don’t mean lower product standards. Quality control is a crucial component in the process, Üster says.

“You have to do 100 percent inspection on remanufactured parts,” he says, unlike new products that are only randomly sampled for quality control.

Lower prices. Higher quality. Enhanced customer satisfaction. Sounds like a closed deal. end of story