Increasing world population and standards of living are leading to increased resource use and disposal. To sustain ourselves at these levels of material comfort will require that our utilization of resources becomes radically more efficient. One strategy for achieving greater material efficiency is the recycling of products back into useful raw materials. Efficient recycling requires attention to the strategic design of reverse production systems. In this paper, we present the concepts and issues surrounding reverse production system design and an initial formulation to address some of the questions around its implementation. The formulation is as a mixed integer linear program and we utilize a robust optimization framework. This framework poses the objective as the minimization of the maximum deviation of the performance of the network from the optimal performance under a number of different scenarios. We illustrate the framework with the example of carpet recycling, which is currently being undertaken on a national scale in the US. The case study shows that the flexibility of the process technology to recycle as large a fraction of the collected material as possible is a strong driver for overall economic effectiveness of the reverse production system.