Remanufacturing

Used to be, you finished using a consumer product and you'd throw it in the trash destined for a landfill or maybe, in a few rare instances, an incinerator. Then we entered the recycling period, which we're still in, in which we take items such as newspapers, glass, plastic, corrugated cardboard, magazines and metal and return them to the manufacturing process as a replacement for or addition to raw materials.

In addition to recycling, we now also have a growing business called remanufacturing. This is an alternative for reusing products in which products are taken back whole for cleaning, fixing, refilling and resale. Think of this as breathing life back into products-parts or components of machines, machines themselves, and numerous products that don't have to be melted down, shredded, boiled or otherwise disintegrated to be reused.

Remanufacturing often is more cost-effective than recycling in the classic sense. Recycling requires processing to break materials down to a form that can be reused as a raw material or supplement in manufacturing. Take plastic soda bottles and the like. Once these are collected they are compacted and baled for storage and shipping. At a recycling plant, bales are opened and then, in an order particular to the recycler, are cleaned, shredded, separated from their paper or plastic labels, separated from metal caps, melted and shaped as a raw material for use by a manufacturer. Other materials go through various other processes before reuse.

Remanufacturing has great economic potential because items don't have to be broken down for reuse. They just have to be serviced, cleaned and refilled. Fixing and refilling things makes a lot of sense. Some of us even remanufacture our automobiles or at least it seems that way after we start replacing engine parts and other components of the vehicle.

Refilling printer toner cartridges, for example, saves on energy, processing chemicals, and other manufacturing-from-scratch expenses as well as environmental impacts from such processing. All kinds of products are remanufactured: vehicle axles, disc brakes, bearings, pumps, generators, electric motors and so on. Come to think of it, remanufacturing isn't much different than taking your lawnmower, television set, microwave or other consumer products into a shop for repair.

Many industries already use remanufacturing opportunities because the quantity of their materials is large. This quantity makes it profitable to return products and machines for remanufacture rather than disposing of them in a landfill. If you want to be part of remanufacturing, pay attention to the consumer products you buy and look for remanufacturing opportunities. Read the instruction books to see if remanufacturing is mentioned. Some toner cartridge manufacturers even provide free return labels. You can even do a web search for the name of your product or its type to see if it can be remanufactured and whether there is a remanufacturer or collector in your area.

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