Even if the economy nowadays is still locked into a linear model of production, tighter environmental standards, resource scarcity and changing consumer expectations are forcing organizations to find alternatives to lighten their impacts. The concept of Circular Economy (CE) is to an increasing extent treated as a solution to this series of challenges. That said, the multitude of approaches and definitions around CE and Life Cycle Extension Strategies (LCES) makes it difficult to provide (Small and Medium Enterprise) SMEs with a consistent understanding of the topic. This paper aims at bridging this gap by providing a systematic literature review of the most prominent papers related to the CE and lifetime extension, with a particular focus on the equipment and machinery sector. A taxonomy was used to define and cluster a subset of selected papers to build a homogeneous approach for understanding the multiple strategies used in the industry, and the standards in maintenance and remanufacturing strategies. As a final research step, we also propose a Strategy Characterization Framework (SCF) to build the ground for the selection of the best strategy to be applied for production equipment life cycle extension on several industrial use cases.
In 48 patients with schizophrenia and 32 patients with affective disorders, different immune parameters were tested. Compared to blood-donors, IgG and IgM serum concentrations were increased in both the schizophrenic and affective disorders. However, these abnormalities did not differ from hospital control populations. The patients failed to show an association of antibodies considered to be characteristic of autoimmune diseases. In addition, no increased incidence of circulating immune complexes was detected. The only substantial serologic abnormality found was an elevation of C4 levels in patients with bipolar psychosis.
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