Design of an electric and electronic equipment recovery network in Portugal - Costs vs. Sustainability

In the last few decades there has been a massive growth in the Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Part of these residues was already properly treated in some countries, but the lack of environmentally friendly options forced the European Union (EU) to take action. Two EU directives were created based on reduction, reutilization and recycling of WEEE. The need to properly design recovery networks for such products appears as mandatory, where not only the economic aspects should be accounted for but also the environmental ones. The present paper addresses this problem and presents a generic optimization model for the design and planning of a recovery and treatment network of WEEE, minimizing both the costs and the environmental impacts that arise from the activity performed. The model is applied to the real case of Amb3E, the Portuguese Association for the Management of Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment. Since its formation, in 2006, this organization has been registering an immense growth in the volume of residue collected, and faces now the necessity of reformulating its recovery network. Both the actual cost structure and the best possible cost structure for Amb3E, given by the optimization of the model, are analyzed. These two scenarios are compared in order to turn clear the differences between them and to assess how the recovery network of Amb3E can be improved through optimization. A similar analysis is performed from an environmental impacts perspective.