Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipments (WEEEs) is currently considered to be one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world, with an estimated growth rate going from 3% up to 5% per year. The recycling of Electric or electronic waste (E-waste) products could allow the diminishing use of virgin resources in manufacturing and, consequently, it could contribute in reducing the environmental pollution. Given that EU is trying, since the last two decades, to develop a circular economy based on the exploitation of resources recovered by wastes, a comprehensive framework supporting the decision-making process of multi-WEEE recycling centres will be analysed in this paper. An economic assessment will define the potential revenues coming from the recovery of 14 e-products (e.g. LCD notebooks, LED notebooks, CRT TVs, LCD TVs, LED TVs, CRT monitors, LCD monitors, LED monitors, cell phones, smart phones, PV panels, HDDs, SSDs and tablets) on the base of current and future disposed volumes in Europe. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis will be used to test the impact of some critical variables (e.g. price of recovered materials, input materials composition, degree of purity obtained by the recycling process, volumes generated, and percentage of collected waste) on specific economic indexes. A discussion of the economic assessment results shows the main challenges in the recycling sector and streamlines some concrete solutions.

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Recycling of WEEEs: An economic assessment of present and future e-waste streams

A number of efforts have been launched to solve the global electronic waste (e-waste) problem. The efficiency of e-waste recycling is subject to variable national legislation, technical capacity, consumer participation, and even detoxification. E-waste management activities result in procedural irregularities and risk disparities across national boundaries. We review these variables to reveal opportunities for research and policy to reduce the risks from accumulating e-waste and ineffective recycling. Full regulation and consumer participation should be controlled and reinforced to improve local e-waste system. Aiming at standardizing best practice, we alter and identify modular recycling process and infrastructure in eco-industrial parks that will be expectantly effective in countries and regions to handle the similar e-waste stream. Toxicity can be deleted through material substitution and detoxification during the life cycle of electronics. Based on the idea of “Control-Alt-Delete”, four patterns of th...

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“Control-Alt-Delete”: Rebooting Solutions for the E-Waste Problem

Circular economy strategies encourage, among others, concrete actions to extend the product lifetime. Product's repair and reuse, and component harvesting for reuse, all require the facilitated access to product components. Consequently, a reduction of the disassembly time and the related costs will increase the economic feasibility of product lifetime extension and therefore increase the viability of a circular economy in industrialised regions. Furthermore, disassembly has the potential to significantly increase the recycling yield and purity for precious metals, critical metals and plastics. For this reason, the European Commission and several ecolabels have considered to include design for disassembly requirements in legislation or voluntary environmental instruments. However, up to date, there is no standardised method to evaluate the ease of disassembly in an unambiguous manner with a good trade-off between the efforts required to apply the method and the accuracy of the determined disassembly time. The article proposes a robust method "eDiM" (ease of Disassembly Metric), to calculate the disassembly time based on the Maynard operation sequence technique (MOST). A straightforward calculation sheet is employed in eDiM to calculate the disassembly time given the sequence of actions and basic product information. This makes the results fully verifiable in an unambiguous manner, which makes eDiM suited to be used in policy measures in contrast to the results of prior developed methods One of the innovative aspects of eDiM is the categorization of disassembly tasks in six categories, which provides better insights on which disassembly tasks are the most time consuming and how the product design could be improved. The proposed method is illustrated by means of a case study of an LCD monitor. The presented case study demonstrates how the proposed method can be used in a policy context and how the calculated disassembly times per category can provide insights to manufacturers to improve the disassemblability of their products. The results also demonstrate how the proposed method can produce realistic results with only limited detail of input data.

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Ease of disassembly of products to support circular economy strategies.

This article analyses the current and future end-of-life management of electronic displays (flat screen televisions and monitors), and identifies and discusses possible ecodesign recommendations to improve it. Based on an investigation of the treatment of displays in two typical European recycling plants, key aspects and criticalities of the recycling methods (sorting, dismantling and pre-processing) are identified. Disaggregated data concerning on-site measurements of the time needed to manually dismantle different displays are presented. The article also discusses the potential evolution of end-of-life scenarios for electronic displays and suggests possible recommendations for recyclers, producers and policy-makers to promote resource efficiency in the recycling of such waste products. Data on time for dismantling the displays can be used to build measurers for voluntary and mandatory policies, to stimulate design innovations for products improvement, and to assess possible alternative treatments of the waste during the pre-processing at the recycling plants. Some quantitative product measures (based on the time thresholds for dismantling some key components) are also discussed, including an assessment of their economic viability. These measures can potentially be enforced through mandatory and voluntary European product policies, and could also be extended to other product groups.

Recycling of electronic displays: Analysis of pre-processing and potential ecodesign improvements

Over the last decade, there has been much effort to promote the management of e-waste in China. Policies have been affected to prohibit imports and to control pollution. Research has been conducted in laboratories and on large-scale industrial operations. A subsidy system to support sound e-waste recycling has been put in place. However, the handling of e-waste is still a concern in China and the issue remains unresolved. There has been relatively little work to follow up this issue or to interpret continuing problems from the perspective of sustainable development. This paper first provides a brief overview of conventional and emerging environmental pollution in Chinese "famous" e-waste dismantling areas, including Guiyu in Guangdong and Wenling in Zhejiang. Environmentalists have repeatedly proven that these areas are significantly polluted. Importing and backyard recycling are decreasing but are ongoing. Most importantly, no work is being done to treat or remediate the contaminated environmental media. The situation is exacerbated by the rising tide of e-waste generated by domestic update of various electronics. This study, therefore, employs a Sales Obsolescence Model approach to predict the generation of e-waste. When accounting for weight, approximately 8 million tons of e-waste will be generated domestically in 2015, of which around 50% is ferrous metals, followed by miscellaneous plastic (30%), copper metal and cables (8%), aluminum (5%), and others (7%). Of this, 3.6% will come from scrap PCBs and 0.2% from lead CRT glass. While more and more end-of-life electronics have been collected and treated by formal or licensed recyclers in China in terms of our analysis, many of them only have dismantling and separation activities. Hazardous e-wastes, including those from PCBs, CRT glass, and brominated flame retardant (BFR) plastics, have become problematic and probably flow to small or backyard recyclers without environmentally sound management. Traditional technologies are still being used to recover precious metals--such as cyanide method of gold hydrometallurgy--from e-waste. While recovery rates of precious metals from e-waste are above 50%, it has encountered some challenges from environmental considerations. Worse, many critical metals contained in e-waste are lost because the recovery rates are less than 1%. On the other hand, this implies that there is opportunity to develop the urban mine of the critical metals from e-waste.

Systematic characterization of generation and management of e-waste in China.

Screens (monitors and TV-sets) actually undergo a rapid change in technology from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays. Up until now, only small quantities of flat panel displays have been recorded at waste collection sites. Increasing quantities in the future make an adequate recycling infrastructure necessary. This paper aims to provide basic data on quantities, composition, recycling technology and experience from a case study on economic impacts of liquid crystal display screens recycling.

Recycling of LCD Screens in Europe - State of the Art and Challenges

Screens (monitors and TV sets) have undergone a rapid change in technology from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays. To date, only small quantities of flat panel displays have been recorded at...

Kurt Maurer

Papers

Recycling of LCD Screens in Europe - State of the Art and Challenges

Recycling of flat screens as a new challenge