Environmentally friendly disposition decisions for end-of-life electrical and electronic products: The case of computer remanufacture

摘要

Increasing concerns about environmental sustainability strategies, take-back laws and natural resource limitation has highlighted the impact of disposing end-of-life (EOL) electrical and electronic products. To cope with this challenge, manufacturers have integrated reverse logistics into their supply chain or chosen to outsource product recovery activities to third parties. This research studies the remanufacturing processes of reusable products and parts, cost and demand of remanufactured products and parts to determine return quality thresholds during multiple production period. We present a general framework for a third party remanufacturer, where the remanufacturer has the alternative of supplying parts to external suppliers or bringing the disassembled parts to 'as new' conditions. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, where with proposed discretization, the problem turns into a quadratic mixed integer programming (QMIP) problem. Finally, the impact of the quantity of returns, operational cost and upper bound disposal rate using a case numerical study of a personal computer (PC) remanufacturing facility has been studied. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.