Design for circular disassembly: Evaluating the impacts of product end-of-life status on circularity through the parent-action-child model

Abstract

Design for disassembly approaches are crucial for supporting industrial circular economy transition. However, a significant limitation of current design for disassembly methods is their inability to model the impacts of a product's end-of-life status on the realized disassembly effort and the subsequent effects on the implemented circular design strategies. To address this gap, our work proposes a novel approach termed Design of Circular Disassembly and a corresponding design for disassembly model, called the Parent-Action-Child model, that can describe and model the impacts of a product's end-of-life status on the disassembly process in terms of disassembly effort and circularity index. The approach was tested for modelling the disassembly process of an electrical kettle. Our study highlights that failing to consider end-of-life product status can lead to sub-optimal design for disassembly recommendations from a circularity perspective.