Towards sustainable product and material flow cycles: Identifying barriers to achieving product multi-use and zero waste

Material and energy resource consumption is on the rise in both the industrialized and developing world (e.g., countries like India and China). In order to sustain this growth and provide resources for future generations, there is a need to design products that are easy to recover and recondition, thus enabling multiple use cycles. Processes are needed that can achieve this multi-use while producing zero (or very near zero) waste. There exist a number of barriers and challenges to achieving this vision of multi-use with zero waste; one such challenge is the development of a product recovery infrastructure that will minimize short-term impacts due to existing products and will be robust enough to recover products of the future. This paper identifies the barriers to developing such a recovery and reuse infrastructure. The aim is to achieve product multi-use and zero waste. Copyright © 2005 by ASME