Development of a recycling centerthrough design thinking

Abstract: Tarkett AB is one of the world's largest companies that manufacture floors and operates in over 100 countries. Tarkett Ronneby is one of two larger recycling centers the company possesses, and they are currently recycling all of the spare material and waste material from the manufacturing processes. Customers to Tarkett are lately offered to bring back used floors to recycle the material. Currently, Tarkett is annually importing and recycling 17 000 tons of material from the production and their customers, and the amount of material handled is estimated to increase to 30 000 tons per year. To handle the amount of material Tarkett Ronneby is going to build a new recycling center. The initial research questions for this master thesis were:• How to dimension the recycling center to handle the predetermined capacity?• How to organise the transport of materials to handle the predetermined capacity?On a higher level, this contribution has also highlighted several findings in relation to the following research question:• How can Design Thinking be used in practice to design a warehouse?To answer the question of whether design thinking can be used as a method for developing a recycling center, this was used as a method. Design thinking was used in all the steps of the development process - to know about both explicit and tacit needs related to the development of the recycling center. Company visits allowed to emphasise with the different stakeholders for the solution, getting in touch with employees and learn more about the processes connected to the recycling center. During the ideation phase, brainstorming has been used to create ideas focusing on smaller parts of a solution. The generated ideas have been combined to create final ideas which were prototyped in a digital environment and the first two were also simulated in discrete-event simulation software. The result was more insights into the problem and an iteration to the define phase was conducted. The iterative nature of the Design Thinking process also meant that new needs were stated along the process and the research questions were redefined to the following:• How shall the predetermined units be stored to fit in the predetermined storage area?To solve this question, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) was used to systematically explore solution strategies for the given problem and propose original ideas. The result is a final prototype in a digital environment showing how the structure of the units stored in the recycling center will look like. According to the model the warehouse will only consist of stackable units and the tent will consist of both stackable and non-stackable units. From the results, it is clear that an investment must be done to store the desired amount of units in the tent and in narrow aisle forklifts. The main future work will be to contact the forklift supplier used at Tarkett Ronneby, STILL, and order GX-X/GX-Q-forklifts, lay a concrete slab, and to update the placing software to cope with the changes and to maintain a high placing accuracy of the units.