Jón Garðar Steingrímsson

Identification and Promotion of Effective and Efficient Product and Material Cycles via Crowdsourcing

To increase use productivity of products and materials, promising combinations of process steps in recycling and manufacturing shall be identified and promoted. Crowdsourcing offers the chance where every member of a community is able to contribute with particular knowledge and innovative ideas about recycling and manufacturing in a collaborative way. The most effective and efficient single or combined processes have to be identified and promoted in order to substitute less good processes. For comparison and evaluation, contributions are structured as value creation modules, clustering product, process, equipment, organization and human related information. This paper describes how manufacturing and recycling process steps are structured, combined and evaluated. The approach is applied on manufacturing of bicycles as a labor intensive and manufacturing of photovoltaic as a capital intensive example.

Business Strategies for Competition and Collaboration for Remanufacturing of Production Equipment

Companies and organizations must cope with the challenge of a demanded sustainability. Collaboration and competition represent a promising approach. The objective of this work is to develop strategies for competition and collaboration which enable increased economical benefit while boosting sustainability issues. The research is focused on value creation strategies, competition, collaboration and their impact as drivers for technological progress. Analysis based on scenarios and forecast reports about value creation in the remanufacturing area of production equipment are carried out. The target is to collect and rank criteria for an evaluation of business strategy regarding sustainability. Existing business strategies for industrial value creation are transferred to the field of remanufacturing analyzed as well as characterized regarding the gathered criteria to support sustainable acting between partners in value creation networks for remanufacturing of production equipment.

Material Reutilization Cycles Across Industries and Production Lines

The concept of Industrial Symbiosis aims at organizing industrial activity like a living ecosystem where the by-product outputs of one process are used as valuable raw material input for another process. A significant method for the systematic planning of Industrial Symbiosis is found in input–output matching, which is aimed at collecting material input and output data from companies, and using the results to establish links across industries. The collection and classification of data is crucial to the development of synergies in Industrial Symbiosis. Public and private institutions involved in the planning and development of Industrial Symbiosis rely however on manual interpretation of information in the course of creating synergies. Yet, the evaluation and analysis of these data sources on Industrial Symbiosis topics is a tall order. Within this chapter a method is presented which describes value creation activities according to the Value Creation Module (VCM). They are assessed before they are integrated in Value Creation Networks (VCNs), where alternative uses for by-products are proposed by means of iterative input-output matching of selected value creation factors.