Hotspot Mapping for product disassembly

Abstract

Designing products for the Circular Economy requires closing and slowing of loops by means of repair, reman-ufacturing, refurbishment, parts reuse and/or recycling. Ease of product disassembly facilitates these processes to be more cost-effective, resulting in a better circular strategy fit. In this paper we present the Hotspot Map-ping method. The objective of this method is to help designers in (re)designing their products for ease of disas-sembly, by assessing which parts in the product architecture are most critical for ease of disassembly. Critical parts are parts with a high failure rate or maintenance need and/or with a high economic and environmental value, that should be easily accessible with low effort to enable cost-effective recovery processes. A product’s ease of disassembly is determined by factors that help or hinder the disconnection of critical parts from the rest of the product. The Hotspot Mapping method is a spreadsheet-based tool that indicates ease-of-disassembly by flagging five ‘hotspot’ indicators: (i) time needed to disconnect parts, (ii) difficulty of access, (iii) priority parts, (iv) environmental impact and (v) economy valuable parts. The Hotspot Mapping method adds to recent repairability assessment methods proposed in standards such as EN45554:2020, by also taking into account other aspects than failure-rate and functionality, such as economic and environmental value of the parts and materials. This paper describes the Hotspot Mapping method and applies the method to a household blender.