author : Dae-Jong Gwak (Industrial Competitiveness Division)

1. Why Remanufacturing?
`Sustainable development` has already emerged as an utmost issue for every country these days, whether developed or underdeveloped. Sustainability can be broken down into the domain of materials and energy. On the use of materials, a certain hierarchical concept is commonly accepted, such as ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’, and for energy consumption there are various conservation alternatives such as increased usage of renewable energy sources which are solar, bio and wind power, etc.
For materials recovery, we have been focusing on recycling until now. Traditional recycling methods cannot give full economic-environmental benefits because they inevitably downgrade the product’s intrinsic values through material recycling. Additionally, in some cases costs for collection, sorting and cleaning exceed benefits through material recovery, as in the case of plastics recycling. For example, experts analyzed that raw material costs are just 5% for beer bottles and 1.5% for vehicles. The remainder of the cost is added value through inputs of labor and energy and manufacturing operations during the production process...