End-of-Life in industry 4.0: Ignored as before?

Abstract

Industry 4.0, indicating a fourth industrial revolution, is based on three basic forms of integration through digital technologies: Horizontal interconnection across the supply chain, vertical interconnection across functional departments, and end-to-end engineering from product development to recycling. By gathering, transmitting, and analyzing data throughout these three forms of integration, several benefits are anticipated for industrial value creation. Relating to the Triple Bottom Line of sustainability, economic, ecological, and social benefits are targeted by Industry 4.0. Extant research on Industry 4.0 has begun to investigate the technological developments from an economic perspective, while the understanding of ecological and social aspects of Industry 4.0 is considerably less understood. Further, entire supply chains, or end-to-end processes have been considered less so far, despite necessary for unlocking the entire benefits of Industry 4.0, especially in an ecological and social regard. Developing the concept of Industry 4.0 towards the idea of a Circular Economy requires to better consider downstream aspects, while benefits are mostly investigated for upstream processes so far, especially towards the End-of-Life (EOL) and recycling of products.