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Remanufacturing: Value Redux

Ilene Wolff
By Ilene Wolff Contributing Editor, SME Media

From furniture to medical-imaging equipment, remanufacturing makes a big impact with a small footprint

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Brian Hilton, senior research engineer at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, N.Y.), reviews plans with a co-worker for a low-cost, sustainable office chair designed by RIT students. (Provided by RIT)

In 1948, Bill Davies’ grandfather started a business refinishing and refurbishing wooden furniture, eventually enlisting his grandson’s help in the shop to extend the life of cabinets and tables. The importance of squeezing all possible usable value out of everyday items took root in the younger man, who now runs an office furniture remanufacturing business, Davies Office, with his wife Evelyn.

“When you visit our facility, you’ll see that we have a fairly substantial capital investment of both people and plant to be able to provide that like-new condition for the products that we’re remanufacturing,” explained Davies, whose business in Albany, N.Y., also includes design services. “We didn’t start out that way, but we’ve evolved into a full-fledged remanufacturer.”

Remanufacturing is a comprehensive and rigorous industrial process by which a previously sold, leased, used, worn, manufactured, or non-functional product or part is returned to a same-as- or better-than-new condition from both a quality and performance perspective. This is achieved through a controlled, reproducible, and sustainable process, as defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Other related restoration processes include refurbishing, rebuilding, recycling, repairing, and reconditioning, according to the standard.

Remanufacturing itself is not new. But it may gain new adherents as the world shifts to a circular economy that’s more sustainable than the current model in which built-in obsolescence is accepted and items with usable life are frequently junked.

The stakes are high, and there’s lots of work to be done.

“I think what we need nationally in this area is really a long-term, sustained plan to ensure that we’re achieving the goals, and we let the science community decide on what the goals are,” said Nabil Nasr, CEO of the REMADE Institute (West Henrietta, N.Y.), which develops platform technologies to reduce embodied energy and carbon emissions associated with industrial-scale materials production and processing.

While Nasr leads a national organization and is director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, N.Y., he also works internationally with the United Nations and other entities to decouple economic growth from negative effects on the environment.

“We want to ensure that we continue to provide the tools and the products that people need in a way that doesn’t degrade environmental quality, and does not result in emissions and waste at the level that we see currently,” he added.

Reman Up

Remanufacturing can be a key part of the plan.

“There are a number of industry sectors out there that do remanufacturing,” noted Brian Hilton, senior research engineer at the Golisano Institute. He cited the defense industry as the leading reman industry, followed by aerospace, but noted neither publicizes their remanufacturing efforts.

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Siva Balakrishnan, general manager of Lifecycle Solutions, GE Healthcare, in the company’s Repair Operations Center in Oak Creek, Wis., where workers perform GoldSeal refurbishing and remanufacturing operations. (Provided by GE Healthcare)

But leading companies in other industries are eager to tout their activities. Examples include Xerox for its large printing presses, Caterpillar for mining and agricultural machinery, and GE Healthcare for imaging equipment.

“For more than 20 years, GE Healthcare’s GoldSeal program has played a vital role in reducing medical imaging equipment waste by promoting and enabling the reuse of equipment and parts from de-installed imaging systems,” attested Siva Balakrishnan, general manager of Lifecycle Solutions, GE Healthcare. “Once professionally de-installed by GE Healthcare technicians and delivered to our Repair Operations Center (Oak Creek, Wis.), each system goes through an exacting, proprietary process to meet original system specifications and performance quality.”

GE Healthcare’s practices range from refurbishing to remanufacturing depending on various factors.

The GoldSeal process starts by selecting systems with years of useful life remaining. Balakrishnan’s team of OEM factory-trained technicians examine the system’s service history and install the latest possible software and original OEM parts. GoldSeal equipment is warrantied just like new equipment.

Davies Office repurposes high-end, used office furniture made by Knoll, Haworth, Steelcase, and Herman Miller.

“We love them because they make great stuff, but they don’t like us because we compete in their marketplace with their own product,” said Davies, vice president of the company. “Many of them, without naming names, have approached us because they do not have an answer for some of the ESG (environmental social governance) initiatives, the zero-waste, carbon-neutral initiatives that are taking place today. So they’re seeking us out and saying, ‘Hey, could we partner on some of these programs, possibly on a pilot basis?’ We’re looking into that.”

Many factors drive sustainability and ESG, according to professional services company EY, including:

  • Government incentives and regulations
  • Investor standards
  • Customer sentiment
  • The views of a company’s workforce
  • Society

Davies Office customers are just as notable as the OEMs that make the furniture being refurbished. Clients include Bank of America, FedEx, and Pacific Gas & Electric. As well as participating in the circular economy, customers of remanufactured furniture can save as much as 70 percent of the original cost, according to Davies.

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Bill Davies, vice president of Davies Office, shows a newly powder-coated drawer front of a remanufactured file drawer to visiting U.S. Representative Paul Tonko (right). The powder-coating line changes the original color of the piece, upscaling it into a new unit. The line doesn’t generate any volatile-organic compounds (VOCs), and is the most environmentally friendly way to finish metal components. (Provided by Davies Office)

Not Just for Big Biz

In Davies Office’s 300,000-sq-ft [27,870-sq-m] facility, discarded office furniture is stripped to its core, then remanufactured via the same processes and techniques used by the OEMs. “We make things by remaking things that somebody else started out with,” Davies explained.

Davies Office is one of a growing number of small and medium-size businesses that are embracing the practice. And the trend is catching on.

Encouraging more businesses to join the remanufacturing movement, Nasr starts by asking a practical question: “How do we ensure that we actually have a balance in what we’re asking industry to do versus what we actually know can be done or can help get us there? We need to really continue to develop the science, the culture, the understanding, and the knowledge.”

De-risking industry’s foray into sustainable manufacturing in general, including remanufacturing, is what Nasr, his colleagues, and members of REMADE are doing through research and development funded by public and private money.

“It’s really the best way to take public money to ensure that you facilitate a lot of companies that can take the work and implement it and get higher value for the U.S. and for our economy,” Nasr said.

REMADE’s strategy is to create tools, test them, and pass along to industry the ones that are proven to work. This includes signature analysis, a method to determine the health of a part or a system, using advanced algorithms and operating parameters such as temperature and vibration.

Another tool provided by the Remanufacturing Industries Council (RIC), which is an affiliate member of REMADE, is the ANSI standard for remanufacturing, RIC001.2-2021.

RIC members also serve on the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for the ISO Circular Economy standards being developed. U.S. TAG accepted RIC’s initial proposal and sent it to an international team for consideration. Several rounds of revisions are expected with a final version due to be published next year.

Software also plays an important role. One project recently funded by REMADE and led by RIT calls for a design for a remanufacturing plug-in module for Autodesk and PTC’s CAD software.

“You would use the software to evaluate an initial design to help you through the remaining design for remanufacturing process,” Hilton said. “There would be questions that would allow you to understand where some of the issues might be with your current design. And then there would be other parts of the software where it would dimensionally check your parts to make sure they are compatible with common remanufacturing processes.”

Starting at the Top

Hilton spends his days in academia focused on remanufacturing, recycling, and extending the life of products. He used to work as a product engineer, so he’s designed and built many products.

“One of the things that I’m trying to do is really think about sustainability, circular economy, and remanufacturing in the same context as traditional product specifications, and then solve design issues using the current tools that (engineers) have,” he said. “And so it’s just another product spec. In that thinking it makes designing for remanufacturing a little easier on the design engineer, because they’re not having to learn new tools to do that.”

To this end, current lifecycle assessment practices can help pinpoint a product’s impact. “And then your biggest design change should be in the area where you have the biggest impact,” Hilton said.

The first thing is to understand how to make sure a product lasts a long time, he explained, then start asking questions:

What are all those things that can fail during that long life you’ve created?

Can I stop that failure from happening?

Or can I restore it? Or recover that at the end?

“If you think about components that are going to wear out, it’s usually things that have friction and they’re rubbing on each other, like a cylinder in an engine that’s sliding against the cylinder walls,” he said. “Well, if you’ve made that wall a replaceable sleeve, when you bring the engine back, it’s very easy to swap out the cylinder sleeves and go on.”

In addition to design and engineering, Hilton thinks about the accounting and economics of remanufacturing.

“To make something more durable, it’s going to cost extra money, let’s say 5-10 percent more,” he said. “When you think about the full lifecycle, and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to get that product back two or three times, and then I’m going to put some money into it with the remanufacturing processes, but that process is going to be a fraction of the cost of making a new one. So then when I sell my remanufactured product, my margin on that product is significantly more. If I do that a couple of times, when I average out the cost of the profit that I’m making, it far outweighs the minuscule additional money that I put into it to make it more robust.’”

Until that kind of thinking takes hold at the level where decisions are made in the C-suite, design engineers will continue to plan products for the lowest cost, he warned.

“Because in reality, if you design something to be remanufactured, and you’re not the one doing the remanufacturing, you’re creating competition for yourself, for your new product, because the aftermarket will step in and remanufacture your product for you,” Hilton said.

In the meantime, those intent on remanufacturing products that aren’t designed for it will unstick glue, break welds, and hammer things apart to recover what they can, he said. All the while they know they could recover so much more value, material, and embedded carbon and energy if the item were designed for remanufacturing, Hilton said.

“There are a number of companies out there that are remanufacturing small auto parts, consumer products, and white goods,” he said. “But I don’t know of anybody that’s designing those products to be remanufactured.”

Creating Sustainable Furniture

Metal furniture manufacturer Calstone Inc. works with Partners in Project Green, a public-private organization that facilitates sustainability in the Greater Toronto area. It also has an in-house “environmental mastermind.”

That’s the nickname employees gave Jim Ecclestone, founder of the Scarborough, Ont., family business as he started implementing sustainability solutions 15 years ago at the Greenguard Certified by UL Solutions (formerly Underwriter Laboratories) manufacturing business.

For example, Ecclestone fabricated a heat exchanger made from an old car radiator controlled by automatic heat units and minimized the total air space to be heated in the 45,000-sq-ft [4,181-sq-m] plant by hanging giant pieces of polystyrene foam from the ceiling. He also designed and fabricated a trough system to collect rain water from the building’s surfaces for efficient trickle watering of outdoor plants.

The MacGyvered heat exchanger is gone, but the rain catchers remain. “It’s quite brilliant,” beamed Cindy Cohanim, the company’s community engagement specialist, of her boss’ innovation.

In the manufacturing plant, fans run atop a paint oven to disburse the equipment’s heat within the facility. Cohanim wasn’t sure if this is a project of the original mastermind or a wannabe inspired by Ecclestone.

In its manufacturing of modular workbenches for e-commerce warehouses, Calstone uses steel with some recycled components. Parts are degreased with TechKleen AZE (NPB) instead of the previously used trichloroethylene, a known carcinogen. Components are powder painted now, which significantly reduces emissions compared with oil-based paint. Spot welders are cooled with recycled rain water, and electric lift trucks replaced propane-powered ones. Wooden skids and cardboard from installations are brought back to the plant for reuse or recycling.

The plant offsets its energy use with Bullfrog Power, a Canadian green energy retailer. Shipping and receiving doors are thermal-insulated, and their windows, along with five skylights, let in natural light. Solar panels are also in the works.

Rain water—476,000 gallons (1.8 million liters) annually—funnels into a 2,400-gallon (9,085-liter) tank, then spills into three ponds in an employee park planted with drought-resistant, native plants.

In addition to its current plant, Calstone’s environmental efforts extend to a 80,000-sq-ft [7,432-sq-m} warehouse and a planned second manufacturing facility, which is expected to measure 60,000 sq ft (5,574 sq m). Calstone also hosted an open house to encourage other businesses to reduce their environmental impact, and the company sponsors three scholarships at a local college, one of which is earmarked for the environmental technology program.

Calstone hasn’t tracked the ROI on such investments, but company officials are confident they’re doing the right thing.

“You can’t put a price on feeling you’re doing a good thing, making your environmental footprint smaller, and keeping your employees engaged and happy,” said Cohanim. “That’s how we feel.”

Disassembly Included

One fundamental principle of design for disassembly, a practice in architecture that also can be used in manufacturing, is creating accessible connections and choosing the appropriate joinery in order to ease dismantlement and avoid the use of heavy equipment, or too many tools. The focus should be on mechanical joinery, using bolted, screwed, or nailed connections, as opposed to non-removable, chemical ones such as binders, sealers, glues or welding, which make the material difficult to separate and recycle.

Tips include:

  • A modular design and standardized parts
  • Fewer parts
  • Pure-material parts
  • Batteries and electronics that are easy to remove
  • Accessible or standardized fasteners
  • Fixings that snap, clip, or slot into place and out again
  • Non-contaminant adhesives

Sources: Principles of Eco-Design blog by a student at the University of Sussex; and Arch Daily website.

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