Designing for Reuse
Xerox maximizes the end-of-life potential of products and components by considering reuse in the design process. Machines are designed for easy disassembly and contain fewer parts. Parts are durable – designed for multiple product life cycles. Coded with instructions on how to dispose, the parts are also easy to reuse or recycle.

As a result, equipment returned to Xerox at end-of-life can be rebuilt to as-new performance specifications, 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 architectures and a common set of core components. These advances offer us many options for breathing new life into old equipment. 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. And there are energy savings. We estimate that 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.

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