Resource Conservative Manufacturing: an essential change in business and technology paradigm for sustainable manufacturing

For sustainability of our future societies we need sustainable manufacturing strategies with resource and environment conservation as their integral part. In this perspective closed-loop supply chains are considered as the most feasible solution. However, their implementation within the paradigm of prevailing open-loop product systems seems extremely complicated and practically infeasible. This paper argues for a radical shift in thinking on the closed-loop systems and presents the novel concept of Resource Conservative Manufacturing (ResCoM). The ResCoM concept considers the conservation of energy, material and value added with waste prevention and environment protection as integrated components of the product design and development strategy. It also presents the innovative idea of products with multiple lifecycles where several lifecycles of predefined duration are determined already at the product design stage thus demanding for new design strategies and methodologies. To succeed with this concept ResCoM advocates for new approach to supply chain design and business models as well, where the customers are integral part of manufacturing enterprises and the product design is effectively connected with the supply chain design. This work concludes that the products, supply chains and the business models developed for open-loop product systems are unable to cope with the dynamics of closed-loop systems. The uncertainties associated with product returns are inherent to the conventional concept of lifecycle and closed-loop systems. The ResCoM concept has much better capability in dealing with these uncertainties while developing sustainable closed-loop systems. The presented work outlines and discusses the conceptual framework of ResCoM. A comprehensive work on the strategic and tactical issues in the implementation of the ResCoM concept will follow. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.