Enhancing disassembly and recycling planning using life-cycle analysis

Both the general public and governmental agencies highly prioritize resource optimization (energy and material) and environmental issues such as ozone, acid rain and global warming in the life-cycle context. Disassembly and recycling are also increasingly important in most industrial countries due to the significant increase in the quantity of used products being discarded. Disassembly of used products has been recognized as necessary to make recycling economically viable in current state-of-the-art reprocessing technology. This emerging trend requires incorporating environmental considerations into design strategies. This study presents a graph-based heuristic method for disassembly analysis of end-of-life products, which incorporates the Eco-Design concept. Product components and their assembly relationships from the bill of material BOM are adopted to split the graph into sub-graphs denoting modular sub-assemblies. The life-cycle analysis LCA is then used to analyze disassembly trees, from which a disassembly sequence can be derived. Designers can use the analytical results to evaluate the dis-assemblability and recyclability of products when they are designed.