Performance measurement of product returns with recovery for sustainable manufacturing

•A performance evaluation framework is developed for assessing various recovery configurations.•Performance attributes of cost, time, waste and quality are used to assess product utilisation.•A trade-off representation map is proposed for the recovery configuration selection.•A manufactured product with two product recovery configurations is numerically illustrated.

Today's lifecycle of new and emerging products, increase in labour costs in developed countries and user's expectations or behaviours including frequently upgrading items with latest features, influence the growth rate of product disposal to landfill. To reduce the negative impact on the environment, global manufacturers need to take responsibility for designing sustainable products and implementing cleaner production systems for 3R operations (3R–Reuse/Remanufacture/Recycle). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of comprehensive measures for assessing product returns with recovery settings. In this paper, a framework for performance evaluation using design for six sigma methodology is developed to estimate utilisation value of a manufactured product with recovery settings, which accounts for total recovery cost, manufacturing lead-time, minimisation for landfill waste and quality characteristic. Finally, a numerical example based on these performance attributes to assess product utilisation value is presented.