Remaking a viable alternative to recycling

News Article - 24 May 2012
Category: Business

The British Standards Institution (BSI) recently released new standards which promote remanufacturing as a more environmentally-conscious alternative to recycling. The BSI says recycling is often less eco-friendly than widely believed, particularly the energy involved in melting down existing items and creating new products from the raw materials.

As an alternative, remanufacturing can be utilised to forge 'as-new' reconditioned items, a process that in many cases offers a superior environmental profile. The BSI report proposes car engines as an example of where this would be most applicable. The energy involved in reforming a car engine would be far less than melting it down to produce raw materials.

Remanufacturing as a process also provides benefits to consumers, who could take advantage of lower-cost, high quality products. In the current economic climate the industry would also benefit from reduced resource needs and a higher ROI on eco-friendly investments.

Remanufacturing guidelines are now available from the BSI as standard BS 8887-220:2010. Developed by a volunteer committee of experts from several sectors including automotive and printer cartridges, the standard has been written to be applicable to all industries. It details the steps involved in the remanufacturing process and includes information related to manufacture, assembly, disassembly and end-of-life processing.

Manufacturing companies in particular should not assume recycling is the most eco-friendly and financially efficient method of reusing old products. The new standards, whilst proposing a method that is in its infancy, are a sign that the manufacturing industry is under pressure to improve its green credentials and improve the eco-friendliness of operations.

Whether recycling or remanufacturing is most appropriate will depend on the business in question. Whichever avenue is followed, it must be efficiently integrated within the business to ensure profitability. Access manufacturing and production software is modularly built and includes many features to help companies effectively monitor the efficiency of operations. Each member of staff can have up to six rates attributed to them, allowing non-everyday operations to be billed by actual costs, giving the company full financial visibility in key business areas.

For more information on how software solutions can help businesses track the quality and effectiveness of operations, please call Access on 0845 345 3300.

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