Manufacturing and Assembly for the Ease of Product Recycling: A Review

Design for manufacturing, assembly, and disassembly is critical in manufacturing. Failing to consider this aspect can lead to inefficient performance and material overuse, which significantly impact cost and construction time. Production with a high capability for recycling is a method to help conserve natural resources. This article is compiled with a review method and has evaluated the recent and related articles that consider design for production, design for assembly and disassembly, design for recycling and reuse, and sustainable design. This review, moreover, aims to focus more on the relationship between using a design approach for production and assembly in the ease of recycling and preservation of raw materials and reuse of materials. The survey for the design methods conducive to achieving ease of recycling is one of the crucial issues that fill the gap in the literature in this respect. Google Scholar was selected as a database, and the keywords “DFMA”, “design”, “facility of recycling”, “recycling”, “EoL”, and “product design” were considered to collect related articles. At first, 115 articles were identified, and 26 articles with a high focus on the subject were selected. Finally, nine articles were considered for final evaluation, 33% of which focused on the design approach for assembly. Many of the issues evaluated are about reducing the number of components and reducing complexity in design, materials, environmental impact, manufacturing cost and time, repair, reuse, end-of-life, remanufacturing, recycling, and non-recyclable waste. According to the mentioned materials, compiling a category of crucial information along with sustainable design indicators and approaches, as well as identifying and explaining the strategic actions of the researchers in this field, will benefit the experts and help them to obtain better insight into environmentally friendly production. This, moreover, helps to substantiate a circular economy by increasing the percentage of recycling materials and parts with various methods and reducing costs and the use of raw materials.