Quality design and environmental implications of green consumerism in remanufacturing

We study quality design and the environmental consequences of green consumerism in a remanufacturing context. Specifically, a firm has the option to design a non-remanufacturable or a remanufacturable product and to specify a corresponding quality, and the design choices affect both the production costs and consumer valuations associated with the product. On the cost side, remanufacturable products cost more to produce originally, but less to remanufacture, than nonremanufacturable products cost to produce. Analogously, on the consumer side, remanufacturable products are valued more, but remanufactured products are valued less, than non-remanufacturable products are valued. Given this, we investigate the environmental consequences of designing for remanufacturability by first defining a measure of environmental impact that ultimately is a function of what is produced and how much is produced, and then applying that measure to assess the environmental impact associated with the firm's optimal strategy relative to the environmental impact associated with the firm's otherwise optimal strategy if a non-remanufacturable product were designed and produced.