Preliminary Product Development Approach for Discarded …
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different degrees of effort for the final consumer effectively discard the product
in a determine location or enrol in a program of scheduled collection program.
Given these points, the U-TURN approach proposes solutions for the material/products to be returned for their reuse as raw material. The U-TURN approach
suggests solutions that although their implementation does not require a lot of effort
by the companies, they can be highly efficient. The suggested solutions are:
• wide access communication channels for the final consumer to easily return the
discarded product;
• fixed locations to receive these materials, such as Collecting boxes in markets,
subways and places of a large flow of people;
• collection “door to door” through a 0800 channel, where the consumer informs the
desire to dispose of the product, and the company through its own or outsourced
fleet makes the collection.
• fixed collection routes, which would be informed to the customer at the time of
purchase or even through the communication channels.
• application of a discount percentage on the purchase of new products for
consumers who decide to take the product directly to the collection points.
Solutions on reverse logistics must be defined by the companies according to their
strategic business field and can include different solutions from the proposed ones.
The U-Turn approach is Cyclical, and for this reason, this Macro-Phase will feed
with the discarded material/product the first one, where after the analysis it will enter
a new production process or will be appropriately disposed of. This Macro-Phase
ensures the effective material/product return, with a high number of products being
inserted and reused in a new sustainable production cycle.
11 Final Considerations
The systematic literature review combined with the content analysis of the articles
that are relevant to the theme of the study showed research opportunities for the
support of sustainable PDP using residues as raw material, evidencing the deficiency
of an approach that allows the integration of the entire supply chain. The literature
review exploration revealed that the main relevant works are not broadly addressing
all the requirements of PDP; in fact, the majority of them focused on specific issues
of materials and/or products.
The approach proposed in this article, called the U-TURN approach, offers a
methodological approach that considers the entire product development process with
sustainable biases, which contributes to fulfilling the lack detected in the literature
and to a new and comprehensive perspective of the Sustainable Products Development Process using discarded materials/products as raw materials. It was designed
in 4 Macro-Phases: (i) Analysis of Discarded Product Reuse Potentiality; (ii) New
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