Issues in environmentally conscious manufacturing and product recovery: a survey

Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Product Recovery (ECMPRO) has become an obligation to the environment and to the society itself, enforced primarily by governmental regulations and customer perspective on environmental issues. This is mainly driven by the escalating deterioration of the environment, e.g. diminishing raw material resources, overflowing waste sites and increasing levels of pollution. ECMPRO involves integrating environmental thinking into new product development including design, material selection, manufacturing processes and delivery of the product to the consumers, plus the end-of-life management of the product after its useful life. ECMPRO 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 research area. Problems are widespread including the ones related to life cycle of products, disassembly, material recovery, remanufacturing and pollution prevention. In this paper, we present the development of research in ECMPRO and provide a state-of-the-art survey of published work.