(Image from Fairphone. https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact/long-lasting-design/ )
Keeping products functional over prolonged times is often the most effective way to reduce environmental impacts associated with mining, manufacturing, and end of- life, as no new products need to be made. Maintenance, reuse and repair prolong the use phase of a product, while refurbishment, remanufacturing, and parts harvesting enable a new life cycle for products or components. To enable these recovery pathways, the product should be built to last. Diagnosis of the status of its components, disassembly, replacement of components, and reassembly should be enabled to facilitate repair and remanufacturing. Legislation increasingly recognizes the importance of lifetime prolongation. Repairing, refurbishing and remanufacturing products requires a product architecture that facilitates these activities, as well as changes to associated service and business models. This will ensure that users as well as businesses adopt new approaches for dealing with products at the end of their functional lives.
Usage
Design for repair and remanufacturing requires knowledge of how products are diagnosed, disassembled, components are repaired or replaced, and products are reassembled and tested. From a product architecture perspective, design for repair and design for remanufacturing have many aspects in common, from a business model perspective repair needs affordable availability of spare parts, while remanufacturing needs reverse logistics and a long-term strategic approach to the design of product generations and product platforms. Design for repair/remanufacturing needs to consider:
- Ease of diagnosis: decrease of functionality or malfunction can be clearly traced to particular (sets of) components.
- Ease of disassembly: products can be disassembled quickly, and priority parts are accessible.
- Ease of reassembly: connections can be reused and can be established manually.
Benefits
- Repair and upgrade are better than recycling: Making our things last longer is both more efficient and more cost-effective than mining them for raw materials.
- Repair and upgrade save users money: Fixing things is often free, and replacements for repair and upgrade are usually cheaper than a new product.
Limitations/Risks
- Designing products for repair and upgradeability may require collaboration with suppliers to ensure a steady availability of compatible components or modules over an extended period.
- Ensuring compatibility between different generations of components or modules can be complex, especially as technology evolves rapidly.