Abstract
There is an increasing need to recover value from products from their end of use and end of life phase as a result of issues of mitigating against resource scarcity, increasing legislation and emerging business models. Reverse logistics is a core process for recovery. There are economic and environmental drivers for such an activity. The challenge for industry is the absence of models to support the development of reverse logistics operations. This absence is both in practice and in the literature. Here we develop generic archetypes for the reverse logistics activity that capture the common structure and the main. The work has been developed through adopting supply chain structures in literature and interviews with industrial experts. The three main archetypes developed here are: low value extended producer responsibility, service parts logistics, and advanced industrial products recovery. The reverse logistics archetypes definition will help firms to identify their key drivers for their reverse logistics structure and help to plan the activities within this process.