The Journal of Remanufacturing is an international, peer-reviewed journal and the first to foster discussion to assist:

• The establishment of the intellectual foundation and direction for the longer-term development of remanufacturing research.
• Step changes in remanufacturing knowledge via holistic, interdisciplinary research that fuses academic and industrial expertise.
• Communication of practice and research developments to enable industry to use remanufacturing to address competitive, environmental and legislative pressures.

Why is remanufacturing important?

The significance of remanufacturing is that:

• It is a critical strategy in waste management, material recovery and sustainable manufacturing.
• It can help producers address the environmental, legislative and competitive pressures of modern manufacture.

Conventional manufacturing is unsustainable because of its significant adverse environmental impacts. Manufacturing generates more than 60% of annual non-hazardous waste (Nasr and Varel 1996) and causes problems including pollution and shortages and therefore high cost of landfill space and virgin materials.

International legislation now aim to force manufactures to reduce the environmental impacts of their products and manufacturing process and to penalize them depending on the amount of waste they produce. Also, global competition requires organizations to reduce product price whilst maintaining quality.

Remanufacturing can help companies address these competitive, legislative and environmental pressures. For example it simultaneously improves competitiveness and limits environmental damage due to production by reducing production costs via reductions in processing and raw material usage. By integrating waste back into the production cycle it limits landfill and cost of waste disposal.

• The primary target audiences are firstly engineers interested in remanufacturing strategy, technique, and technology and secondly, a diverse group of researchers interested in the environmental dimensions or implications of remanufacturing.
• Management scholars interested in remanufacturing from the operations research (OR) perspective, e.g., modeling of reverse supply chains will also find the journal highly beneficial as a source of knowledge and for disseminating information.