Criticality of Product Recovery Management in Sustainable Supply Chain

The challenge of sustainability in manufacturing is to have efficient and effective supply chain management with particular focus on product recovery operations. However, currently numerous manufacturers neglected product return policy and strategy due to the lack of measureable criteria to justify product recovery operations and management. In order to address this current gap, this paper suggests a new business model that caters for product recovery management in achieving sustainable supply chain. To minimise unexpected returned product quality and quantity, 6R (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, remanufacture, and redesign) approach is introduced in this paper for integration within product recovery business processes to create a hybrid system to achieve :sustainability in manufacturing. Future research should concentrate on the integration of this 6R approach within the supply chain process of returns management for establishing this hybrid system to resolve the production planning and management issue of uncertain returns quality and quantity in order to gain sustainable advantage.