Grey Decision Making as a tool for the classification of the sustainability level of remanufacturing companies

Remanufacturing facilitates multiple usages of products by providing several life cycles and contributes to more sustainable societies by the reduction of raw materials and energy consumption. Previous studies on sustainability assessment in remanufacturing focus predominantly on the life cycle design and the life cycle engineering approach. There is a research gap regarding the assessment of remanufacturing operational excellence as far as sustainability issues are concerned. The problem in the application of the principles of sustainable development in everyday business operations is the lack of clearly defined sustainability indicators, which might be used in the assessment of remanufacturing activities. In this paper authors present a set of indicators which are used as the criteria for sustainability assessment and to address company classification. Authors define three classes of companies, which respond to the different sustainability levels. The aim of this paper is to provide a new tool for decision making based on Grey Decisions Making. This tool helps in classifying the current state of remanufacturing operations, and then identifying and prioritizing operations in the company which need improvement actions. The authors present the numerical example in order to explain the decision making process and indicate how the application of Grey Decision Making (GDM) can contribute towards more sustainable societies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.