For over 20 years Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has provided affordable repair and reuse of PlayStation consoles outside of warranty in the UK. Up to 4000 consoles a month can be repaired, avoiding the creation of electronic waste and unnecessary consumption of virgin resources. To return a console for repair consumers can take it back to the retailer, use a website, or phone a dedicated call centre to organise for it to be collected. SIE partners with a specialist logistics company, Cycleon, who manage and organise the collection of consoles from retailers and customers. They take the consoles to a dedicated service centre, Infoteam, who carry out diagnostics and repairs. Any consoles beyond economic repair are harvested for reusable spare parts before being sent to secure facilities for recycling. Cycleon also organise carriers to return the repaired or replacement consoles to customers. As the cost of repairing a console is less than the cost of a new product the out-of-warranty repair service is viable and SIE’s reverse logistics operations successful. The overall process of console repair is also quick and easy from the customer’s perspective; the partnership with a 4PL has brought the end-to-end average time within 21 days. Consoles are complex products using proprietary technology; this service depends on having dedicated expert technicians at Infoteam. The repair process is made more efficient by collecting data on recurring issues from the service centres. This information is fed back to product design teams and used to improve the product, making consoles more reliable in the longer term; there has been an 80% reduction in return rates from the initial PlayStation®4 model to the most recent. This reverse logistics business model benefits both the consumer and the environment as it considers the whole lifecycle of the product, helps to improve product reliability, and avoids the need for consumers to replace broken consoles unnecessarily through an efficient collection, repair and return process.
Case study taken from: Our Waste, Our Resources: A Strategy for England, DEFRA (London, 2018), 4.