SPEAKING ON CIRCULAR ECONOMY
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The new year has kicked off on a couple of bright notes for me - one, I have started on a new role at JLR in the Energy Storage team looking at battery remanufacturing and second life scenarios for the batteries that are no longer useful for electric vehicles (for example, grid energy storage) and second, I have been invited by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), UK to speak and present my research work done on remanufacturing as part of the overall circular economy agenda at JLR.
The research work that I completed while doing my Masters was essentially an inductive type of research which was carried out by employing multiple research and data collection methods. It primarily relied on the rich qualitative data generated from semi-structured interviews from a wide mix of 38 participants belonging from different groups. The figure below illustrates the different sources of primary data collection.
The participants were divided into a set of 5 groups – JLR, JLR retailers, independent remanufacturers, benchmark OEM’s and the think-tank group comprising of academic/consultants/trade bodies as shown below:
Background
In the current resource constrained business environment, sustainability is fast becoming an imperative as companies move to adopt various sustainability practices into their operations. Jaguar Land Rover by way of incorporating life-cycle thinking into its products and by developing eco-efficient technologies has been at the forefront of the various eco-innovation mechanisms.
The current sustainability thinking at JLR to future proof itself is to fully operate in a perfectly closed loop model of business, leaving very little or no waste in the product’s entire life cycle. Remanufacturing, which is a key circular economy strategy, still has enormous hidden potential that stands to be exploited.
The purpose of this study was to address remanufacturing from a sustainability viewpoint and to use the knowledge gained to further address and propose solutions to JLR by developing a strategic action plan for remanufacturing.
I will be focusing and writing more on remanufacturing and circular economy on my blog in the hope to create more widespread knowledge on the subject.
Main image source:Closed loop system. Adapted from Nasr & Thurston, 2006
