Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The world economy (extract-produce-use-dispose) has taken a linear form for decades. This trend is unsustainable and comes with many problems. The pressing ones are the significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and recycling toxic and solid waste instead of sending them into landfills and incinerators. Minimizing resource extraction, using renewable energy sources, and extending product life through recovery programs have become popular concepts. This research proposal will build on the principal investigator's earlier research by developing models that help managers and policymakers make decisions to improve the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of supply chain systems. It will do so by exploring strategies for increasing the collection, recovery, and reuse of items that have reached their end life while significantly reducing all forms of waste, harmful emissions, and energy inefficiencies. This research proposal will also consider strategies to improve the sustainability performance of closed-loop supply chains and manage the cyclic flow (forward/reverse) of items and components more effectively and efficiently. In this regard, the deliverables from this research proposal will make remanufactured items (or cores) available and affordable, product recovery programs profitable, and closed-loop supply chain operations more energy efficient. This research proposal will develop mathematical models more representative of real-life closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs). This research proposal has three short-term objectives. Objective 1 will develop models that help achieve more sustainably responsible production, recovery, and inventory policies for CLSCs through improved management of core collection, core quality, and core timing. Objective 2 will develop models to study the benefits of seeding (selling new as remanufactured) to make remanufactured items (cores) more affordable and remanufacturing, and, subsequently, a CLSC system, profitable and environmentally sustainable. Objective 3 will go beyond economics by focusing on environmental optimization and improvement through exploring, selecting, and evaluating alternative strategies to reduce energy consumption in CLSCs.  The long-term objectives of this proposal align with Canada's commitment to reducing global warming, specifically greenhouse gas emissions, by moving to net-zero emissions by 2050 and eliminating the production of solid and other harmful waste. This research proposal will contribute, in its capacity, to achieving "A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy". Addressing the short-term objectives is the entry to addressing the long-term ones. Finally, this research proposal will provide ample training opportunities for Highly Qualified Personnel (doctoral and master's students and postdoctoral research fellows) who will be tomorrow's industrial and systems engineers, researchers/academicians, and systems operations managers.