Evaluating remanufacturing industry of China using an improved grey fixed weight clustering method-a case of Jiangsu Province

Abstract Remanufacturing industry can solve the issues of resource depletion and environment deterioration by reducing consumptions of raw materials and minimizing emissions of wastes. It has been strongly promoted by Chinese government in recent years. However, its current development situation has been unsatisfactory all the time. The aim of this paper is to evaluate development level of remanufacturing industry of China and point out future directions of industrial improvement. To achieve the above objective, this paper establishes an evaluation index system of remanufacturing industry and puts forward an improved grey fixed weight clustering method, which is suitable for assessing remanufacturing industry. Then taking Jiangsu Province of China as a practical case, this method is used to evaluate its remanufacturing industry and identify rank order of improvement measures for each city. Research results show that overall development level of remanufacturing industry is still low and development unbalance is remarkable. Two more important findings are as follows: The first is that rank orders of improvement measures for all cities are different from each other and decision maker should adopt differentiated industrial policies and improvement measures. The second is that the cities which belong to the 2nd and 3rd grey class should paid more attention to improvement measures for four evaluation sub-indices: Annual sale of remanufacturing industry, Total assets of remanufacturing enterprise, Total investment of under construction and Total number of research institution and university participated in remanufacturing. The major contribution of this study is to offer an effective decision-making approach for evaluation of remanufacturing industry. It helps in classifying development levels of remanufacturing industry in different cities and providing decision makers with a scientific basis for adopting appropriate industrial policies and improvement measures, which will efficiently enhance remanufacturing industry in the future.