Page 251 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

Electr onic Equipment Industries 227

reusing 70–90% of machine components (by weight), while meeting
performance specifications for equipment with parts that are all new.
Xerox also designs product families around modular product archi-
tectures and a common set of core components.
Thanks to these advances, a returned machine can be rebuilt as
the same model through remanufacture, converted to a new model
within the same product family, or used as a source of parts for next-
generation models. Improved forecasting of equipment returns has
allowed Xerox to rely on previous generations of equipment as a
source of components for products in development. A Xerox product
whose designs are based on previous models may have 60% of its
parts in common with previous equipment. The practice of reusing
parts reduces the amount of raw material needed to manufacture
new parts, which generates several hundred million dollars in cost
savings each year. Moreover, energy savings are significant; in 2006,
energy savings from reused parts totaled six million therms (170,000
megawatt hours)—enough energy to light more than 136,000 U.S.
homes for a year.
These capabilities have made it easy for Xerox to comply with the
various country programs that implement the European Union’s
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive (see
Chapter 3). The annual amount of waste diverted from landfill has
declined since 2002, in part due to lighter-weight machines (see Fig-
ure 11.3). In addition, the number of office machines returned for
remanufacturing has decreased since the WEEE legislation mandates
the national collection and recycling of scrap office products.

FIGURE 11.3 Annual waste
avoidance due to Xerox
end-of-life asset recovery Waste Diverted from Landfills
programs. Through Parts Reuse/Recycle
143 139
128
111
107
Millions of Pounds 49

95
16
91 02 03 04 05 06
Parts Recycled
Parts Reused