Issues in environmentally conscious manufacturing and product recovery: a survey

Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Product Recovery (ECMPRO) has b ecome an obligation to the environment and to the society itself, enforced primarily by governmental regulations and customer perspective on environme ntal issues. This is mainly driven by the escalating deterioration of the e nvironment, e.g. diminishing raw material resources, overflowing waste site s and increasing levels of pollution. ECMPRO involves integrating environme ntal thinking into new product development including design, material selec tion, manufacturing processes and delivery of the product to the consumers, plus the end-of-life management of the product after its useful life. ECMP RO related issues have found a large following in industry and academia who aim to find solutions to the problems that arise in this newly emerged res earch area. Problems are widespread including the ones related to life cycl e of products, disassembly, material recovery, remanufacturing and pollutio n prevention. In this paper, we present the development of research in ECMP RO and provide a state-of-the-art survey of published work. (C) 1999 Elsevi er Science Ltd. All rights reserved.