How Xerox Reduces Waste and Saves on
Material Costs through Recovery and Remanufacturing
of Printer Parts
Costs and Benefits of
Parts Reprocessing at Xerox
Oklahoma City
Costs
Management
of the sourcing,
transport, and
storage of
recovered parts.
Extra work for
field techs to
disassemble and
recover parts.
Maintenance of
a clearinghouse
to store used
parts.
Redesign of
parts to be
more durable
and to facilitate
disassembly.
Coordination
with corporate
R&D and
facility vendors
to design
products with
reprocessing in
mind.
Savings and
Other Benefits
Reduces raw material costs
by using available aluminum
parts; this project has
generated $2 million/yr.
savings for Xerox.*
Creates supply chain
efficiencies and reduces
upstream environmental
impacts.
Reduces the energy and
waste footprints of Xerox
products.
Creates new capabilities
in recycling and product
innovation.
*2009 estimate
National
Environmental
PerformanceTrack
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
PERFORMANCE TRACK FACILITY
Xerox—Oklahoma City Supplies Manufacturing Plant,
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
GOAL CATEGORY
Products
RELATED INDICATORS
Downstream: Expected lifetime waste (to air, water, land)
from product use
OVERVIEW
The Xerox Oklahoma City Supplies Manufacturing Plant manufactures a variety of parts
and raw material resins for Xerox's black and white and color printer lines. As a member
of Performance Track, the Oklahoma City facility set goals to reduce the expected
lifetime waste of its products. These product performance improvements align with
Xerox's "waste-free" goal, which aims to minimize waste across a product's entire life
cycle—during manufacturing, use by the customer, and at the end of the product's
initial useful life.
Xerox design teams work directly with the manufacturing engineers at the Supplies
Manufacturing facility to maximize the end-of-life potential of parts by emphasizing
easy disassembly, durability, reuse, and recycling. This design approach ensures that
printer parts can be reprocessed and recovered, thereby minimizing the need for virgin
material to produce new parts and reducing the amount of waste generated by Xerox
products—a source of savings from reduced material, energy, waste, and freight costs.
One significant product design initiative at Xerox Oklahoma City involved the
reprocessing of corotron parts in printers by service technicians. (A corotron is a device
used in printers and copiers to create an electric field that attracts toner particles.) This
improvement has saved more than $ 10 per part in service and material costs while
helping Xerox to realize a 58 percent normalized reduction of material sent to the
landfill related to the corotron part lifecycle.
REMANUFACTURING OF COROTRON PARTS
AT XEROX
Corotrons are composed of a wire assembly set inside an aluminum housing. Xerox's
new corotron design has a more robust housing with a longer useable life than the
wire assemblies, which allows field technicians to replace the wire assembly without
replacing the aluminum housing. In 2007, 73 percent of the corotron wire assemblies
shipped by Xerox were part of this reprocessing effort, an increase over the 2006 rate
of 34 percent.
Field technicians can also recover corotrons from customers' machines during routine
maintenance, sending these parts to Xerox's clearinghouse for used and returned parts
for reprocessing, remanufacturing, and redistribution in the supply chain.
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Xerox Equipment Recovery and Parts
Reuse/Recycle Process
Xerox's process diagram for equipment recovery and reuse/recycling
of printer parts.
By reprocessing and reusing the aluminum housings, Xerox has
saved on material and resource costs and reduced the amount of
material sent to the landfill. Currently, aluminum housings from
Xerox products in Europe and North America are reprocessed
either through the clearinghouse, or by field technicians who
recover the corotron and simply replace the wiring assembly
and reuse the housing. Reprocessing the plastic housing that
protects the new wire assemblies for shipment is the next step in
improving the lifecycle of these materials.
IMPLEMENTATION OF PARTS
REPROCESSING AT XEROX
OKLAHOMA CITY
In order to accomplish its redesign of the corotron, Xerox
developed a process flow diagram to coordinate manufacturing
activities between the aluminum housing supplier, the coating
vendor, and Xerox's manufacturing, distribution, and service
technicians. Xerox's equipment return processing clearinghouse
was included in the loop to ensure efficient sourcing of used
parts according to available inventories. Communication between
all parties and buy-in by implementers were critical elements in
the success of this take-back program.
Xerox worked with its aluminum housing supplier to develop a
method to clean used housings and repaint the aluminum per
product specification. The company remanufactured test units
and placed them in internal test machines to ensure that the
reprocessed parts did not affect copy quality. Only parts that
meet all functional, reliability, and appearance parameters for the
life of the product are processed for reuse.
As components are returned from the field for re-use, the
facility measures the associated product waste improvements.
Information is collected from manufacturing production
logs and recorded by product and month, and progress
toward goals is reported through the facility's Environmental
Management System.
BENEFITS OF REPROCESSING PARTS
The reprocessing of corotrons in the field reduced the amount
of parts shipped in aluminum housings by 55 percent in 2007.
Of those that were shipped in aluminum housings, 24 percent
were recycled via the return/remanufacturing process. From
a reporting perspective, this translates into a more than two-
fold normalized increase in the amount of material recycled for
corotrons manufactured at the Xerox Oklahoma City facility, with
an associated 58 percent normalized reduction in material sent to
landfill in one year.
Xerox's Oklahoma City Supplies Manufacturing Plant saves
resources and money as more of its parts and products are
designed with remanufacturing built into their life cycle.
The corotron project has saved Xerox approximately $2
million per year in material costs, and the facility continues
to evaluate the durability and lifespan of its other parts to
uncover new remanufacturing opportunities. Parts are now
more modular, having separable assemblies with individual
replaceable components, avoiding the need to replace an
entire piece of equipment.
Post-consumer recovery and remanufacturing has clearly
been cost-effective for the Oklahoma City facility. For Xerox,
reprocessing has become more than just a waste strategy, it
is now part of its core business strategy, saving the company
millions of dollars in energy and material costs every year.
RESOURCES FOR MORE INFORMATION
* EPA WasteWise [http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/partnerships/
wastewise/index.htm] partners with businesses and local
governments to help reduce waste and improve resource
efficiency.
* EPA's Pollution Prevention site [http://www.epa.gov/oppt/
p2home/index.htm] supports efforts by companies to avoid,
eliminate, or reduce waste generated to air, land, and water.
* To learn more about Xerox's commitment to the environment
visit www.xerox.com/environment.
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