Date of Award
1-1-2019
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
Supervisor
Waguih Elmaraghy
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
In recent years climate change has become a big challenge affecting all human beings, living creatures and the entire ecosystem. Hence the importance of mitigating its effect and finding innovative solutions to combat and slow down its accelerating impact on the environment. One of the solutions is to reduce emissions and restore the earth which is the “circular economy” concept. This research is focused on the indicators that can be used to measure the circularity of a product. The analysis compares more than one assessment tool used as indicator then an in-depth research is performed on one of the methodologies proposed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which includes a main indicator known as the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) and two complementary indicators known as risks and impacts complementary indicators. The goal of the proposed study is a new methodology and a new tool to measure the product circularity that takes the complexity of the product into consideration. One way to measure the product complexity is to measure the ease of disassembly and the time and effort required to disassemble a product which can be reflected as the profitability of disassembly. The profitability of disassembly is calculated by finding out the amount of material that can be extracted feasibly from a product or, to put it in another way a decision must be made to recycle or not to recycle in advance, which is usually related to the material’s price as well as the time of disassembly. This is especially the case if there is no incentive to recycle or regulations to encourage recycling, where the profit factor becomes a dominant one in taking the decision to recycle or not. The significance and novelty of this research comes from providing a more accurate measurement for the material circularity indicator proposed by Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation, as well as finding out the feasibility of recycling by looking at the different challenges related to the product’s complexity.
Recommended Citation
Elia, Maha, "Design for Circular Economy" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 8163.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/8163
Tool to measure the product recyclability based on product complexity