Everything old is new again!

Recently, BusinessWeek published a feature article (by Brian Hindo and Michael Arndt) recognizing the profitable interface of product recovery activities. Although, both business and sustainability aspects were around for more two decades, sustainability was somehow always dominant.

Article emphasizes the profit motive in the face of increasing prices of resources and authors take us for a virtual tour in Caterpillar Reman operations. For companies ignoring the potential in remanufacturing, this article can act as a wake-up call. Average cost breakdown of new vs. remanufactured products revealed by a Boston University study speaks for itself (see below graph).

A short excerpt on the hidden potential:


“...the fuel injector case, a little groove-headed piece of metal that helps spray fuel into a diesel engine's combustion chamber. The cases would usually come back into the reman facility pretty beaten up, the grooves worn down after half a million miles of use. "For years we just threw them in the scrap bin," says Fisher. "The part costs about $3." But engineers found a way to reconstitute the groove to like-new condition. Fisher explains: "We actually take a laser [and use it to] put metal inside that groove, and then remachine it. It costs us 50 cents. And we're doing about a million of these a year.”