Exercise Your Rs! You Never Know When You May Need Them: Revisiting and Extending Modes of Product Life for the Future

Do you remember the slogans regarding the 3 Rs; well, there is actually 12. Each R can provide opportunity, but can also create peril if a management team is unacquainted with it at an inopportune time. Hence, we revisit the urgent need for companies—and society in general—to rethink supply chain strategy with respect to Rs. The expansion of the 3 Rs to 12 is inherent with the view that consumers and markets are focusing on product life extension—not product obsolescence. In an obsolescence economy, there are only three Rs and the R most revered and reported is Recycling. However, if the focus is on product life extension—getting all the value possible from a product and the by-products that result from the production, use and disposal of the product—recycling is considered the least attractive of the Rs. This is increasingly important as we face millennial challenges associated to greater glocal sustainability. The pandemic of 2020 shows us that even with tremendous shuttering of the world economy, greenhouse gas emissions and other measures of pollution are still substantial. In fact, the level of economic activity during the height of global lockdowns is described as being consistent with what is needed to keep the global average temperature to the target of 1.5 °C above baseline. Consequently, marshalling and extending our technical knowledge and related managerial skills is needed to meet the challenges of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring sustainability more broadly. Firms that are unaware of their position and that of their supply chains in relation to the 12 Rs, will have difficulties at multiple points in the future. Supply chains that engage the 12 Rs in an appropriate manner not only can avoid future difficulties but reduce their cost basis at a time when the growth in many markets is flat at best.