E-waste:
an opportunity
by Matthew J. Realff*, Michele Raymond§, and Jane C. Ammons†
The success of the electronics industry over the last
decade in developing a mass consumer market for
computers, cell phones, and other personal electronic
equipment has been phenomenal. Society must now
finds ways of safely and economically recovering the
materials that are embedded in these products. This
will require significant investment by governments,
industry, and individuals in technology and education
to reshape societal attitudes to waste disposal. This
multidimensional and multiscale problem will be a
pivotal challenge as we close material cycles and
move away from linear material use.
*School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta GA, 30332-0100, USA
E-mail: matthew.realff@chbe.gatech.edu
†School of Industrial & Systems Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta GA, 30332-0205, USA
§Raymond Communications, Inc.
5111 Berwyn Road #115,
College Park, MD 20740, USA
40 January 2004
The wide scale reuse and recycling of products to
avoid the disposal of concentrated materials is a
strategy that both intensifies materials’ use and
reduces disposal. This may help in achieving more
sustainable patterns of production and consumption
for a growing world population that expects ever
higher standards of living. Recycling mass produced
consumer products such as white goods, refrigerators,
and washing machines, is not new, and sophisticated
infrastructures for scrap metal have been in place for
decades. However, electronic products are a major
new category, which have experienced rapid growth
over the last decade, particularly in the area of
personal computers.
It is estimated that, by 2005, one computer will become
obsolete for every new one put on the market. Between
1997 and 2004, 315 million computers will become obsolete.
This will result in the discard of 550 x 106 kg of Pb,
900 000 kg of Cd, 180 000 kg of Hg, and 0.5 x 106 kg of
Cr VI. This will also yield additional waste in the form of
1800 x 106 kg of plastic and at least 159 x 106 kg of
brominated flame-retardants from monitors. The disposal of
consumer electronics accounts for 40% of Pb in landfills.
Additionally, 22% of the yearly world consumption of Hg is
used in electronics1. The successful capture and reuse of
these streams of materials will require a combination of
government initiatives at local, regional, national, and
supranational levels, as well as public willingness and
innovations in materials, products, and recycling
technologies. Above all, this is a systems problem, where
ISSN:1369 7021 © Elsevier Ltd 2004

innovations at different scales and levels must be tied
together to achieve the maximum impact.
Legislative initiatives
An important part of the electronics recycling problem is the
legislative framework that has or is being established in a
particular region. There are 11 countries that currently have
‘mandatory’ electronics recovery laws on the books. They
include Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Japan, Taiwan, and South
Korea. There are extensive voluntary programs in a number of
other countries, such as Germany, and draft takeback bills in
several more, including China.
The European Union (EU) enacted two directives in
January 2003. The first, referred to as WEEE, requires industry
to ensure recycling of any electronic product with a battery
or a cord. A second, Restriction on Hazardous Substances
(RoHS), phases out Hg, Cd, Pb, and Cr VI in all electronic
items by July 2006, with a number of exemptions. In Asia,
Taiwan and Japan have fee systems in place for takeback of
computers, large appliances, and air conditioners. Japan’s
private collection system includes TVs, while Taiwan’s
includes printers. South Korea enacted new takeback laws for
electronics in 2003, covering major electronic items, phasing
in small products such as cell phones and cameras in 2005.
In the Americas, activity has been concentrated in the
north. In Canada, provinces with authority to require
takeback of electronics cover about 95% of the population,
most of which are expected to demand recycling plans from
industry by 2005. In the US, the government initiated the
National Electronic Product Stewardship Initiative, a series of
talks in 2001 to set up a national recovery system for
electronics. While no agreement had been finalized as of
October 2003, there were 52 electronics waste (e-waste) bills
introduced in 26 states in 2003. California enacted a fee on
cathode ray tubes (CRTs) in October 2003, as well as a
restriction on heavy metals that mirrors the EU RoHS
requirements for CRTs over 4”.
From this catalog of activity, it would appear that a
worldwide consensus is emerging to regulate the disposal of
electronic products and that legislation will be enacted over
the next few years. However, the specific tack being taken by
regions varies and may lead to significant overheads for
global manufacturers trying to comply with different
regulations. In all cases, it will be important to establish
INSIGHT FEATURE
economically efficient system designs that combine effective
recycling technology with socially acceptable collection
systems.
Recycling system design
The system design level is concerned with strategic decisions
that will connect discarded products to final use as recycled
products, component parts, materials, or energy. The scope of
the system design is to connect the product retirement with
a suitable point in the forward production system where its
reuse, or that of its components or materials, is most
economical and environmentally sound (Fig. 1). It can be
considered the equivalent of the forward supply chain, which
many companies optimize on a daily basis. We have termed
this the reverse production system2. Forward supply chains
begin with primary extraction of raw materials, such as
mining, drilling, or agriculture. In contrast to mining and
drilling, the reservoirs of raw materials for recycling are
centers of human population with lower resource density,
while in contrast to industrial farming, there is greater
diversity in the resource. Unlike physical reservoirs, with
behavior defined by geological parameters, reservoirs of
retired products are governed by socio-economic factors that
we are barely beginning to understand.
At the most rudimentary level, the potential supply of
products is equal to those sold, but even this data is highly
fragmented and incomplete. Companies hold such data
closely for marketing purposes, while the rise and fall of
manufacturers leads to ‘orphan’ products whose numbers are
difficult to quantify and whose material composition may no
longer be known. The uncertainty in the total number and
profile of the sales of these products is complicated by the
profile of their use, obsolescence, and failure. The final filter
Increase in manufactured value
component
Material manufacturing Final
manufacturing assembly
Raw material Point
refining of sale
Collection
Chemical Material & sorting
recycling compounding Demanufacturing
Decrease in manufactured value
Fig. 1 General forward-reverse production systems scheme. Solid arrows indicate the
possible flows of material, while the dotted arrows correspond to one option for a
recycling system design.
January 2004 41
 INSIGHT FEATURE
is the behavior of the consumer with regard to disposal: how
quickly and diligently will the product be recycled? These
factors make the prediction of recycling volumes extremely
difficult; methods are in their infancy3-7 and data on
recycling programs in the US is sparse8-12. What has emerged
in the US, however, is that participation rates are relatively
low, between 1% and 10% of those who have something to
recycle. The spectra of the age and condition of the products
are very broad, with products 20 years old or older in the
case of TVs. Furthermore, the age of retired computers
appears to be increasing. This could be a result of the recent
economic downturn, causing individuals and companies to
hold on to their existing assets for longer13, or that the pace
of functional obsolescence is slowing.
For electronic products, there are a number of problems
that have to be faced at the strategic level, none of which is
more challenging than collection, because of the issues of
volume estimation outlined above. The initial collection of
discarded products has been approached in many ways and is
likely to have very different configurations depending on the
locale (e.g. US versus Europe). In the US, for example, several
companies allow you to mail products back to them,
particularly if they still have residual value, such as current
generation monitors. This has a very high cost and is unlikely
to be effective for bulky items that are obsolete or broken.
Some states have collection centers at which products can be
dropped off, and nonprofit organizations have sprung up to
take back products that can be reused in other channels, such
as zero cost computers for disadvantaged groups. A
mechanism that is growing in popularity is the ‘special event’,
organized at a public venue such as an electronics retailer or
university campus, to which the general public is invited to
come and drop off their e-waste, often with a fee associated
for each car or item. This can work well in the US where
suburban ‘big box’ stores with large car parks are the
dominant retail outlet, but is likely to be much more difficult
to implement in Europe.
Europe, however, has some relatively mature systems for
the collection of e-waste. For example, the SWICO system in
Switzerland and the Netherlands Association for Disposal of
Metalectro Products (NVMP) or ICT for IT equipment
programs. The NVMP program established regional centers
that collect 80% of e-waste, with the remainder coming
through retailers. It is estimated that 77% of TVs and 64% of
other small brown goods are recovered.
42 January 2004
The inherent problem with collection mechanisms is that
they can have very high variability in volume and, hence, in
the cost per item collected. For example, a special event may
be ineffective because of poor publicity, location, or weather.
A fixed location may lead to a very reliable stream of
material, but has high fixed overhead costs. Nonprofit
organizations are not obligated to take e-waste and may
deter recycling if too many items are refused because they
cannot be reused. The price charged to the public may also
deter participation and lower the volume collected. In Europe,
legislative initiatives have placed the burden on
manufacturers to finance and develop schemes to recover
such products. In the US, the wider distribution of legislative
power to the state level is leading to a more diverse set of
solutions, weakening the power to negotiate with companies.
What is clear, at the current state of development, is that no
one collection mechanism dominates the others and
continued data gathering on volumes and costs is warranted.
The crucial aspect of the collection mechanism is that it
can dominate the cost and scale of the overall reverse supply
chain and the types of solutions that can be considered. For
example, a scheme that can deliver high and consistent
volumes of material will encourage systems with significant
capital investment. However, at some point, the additional
cost of either intensifying the collection system, by raising
the participation rate of consumers through advertising
expenditure for example, or raising its geographic coverage
and hence transportation costs, will outweigh the economies
of scale or saturate the market. In other product systems,
such as carpet, this has proved to be a particularly difficult
trade-off to manage. Effective technologies exist to recover
high value monomers from polyamide-6 depolymerization to
caprolactam, but developing the necessary collection systems
and co-product networks to use other carpeting types has
proved very difficult. In electronics, the problems are
compounded by the unpredictability of the stream quality in
terms of its reusability and, for some materials, the fact that
the manufacturing systems to which they are coupled have
moved offshore. This leads to the ironic situation that
exporting e-waste may actually be the right course of action
because the materials recovery operations might benefit from
close proximity to the end markets. However, the Basel
Convention, adopted by the EU and other OECD
(Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
members, has focused on limiting the movement of
 INSIGHT FEATURE

hazardous waste and treating it as near as possible to its 33%

point of generation14. Its goal has been to prevent damage to Shredding/ Plastic
grinding Glass
human and environmental health through unsafe handling of Other
Metal
waste in regions where standards are lower or enforcement is Metals removal Wood
lacking. This precautionary approach is entirely appropriate 49% 12%

until mature systems and monitoring of environmental and Density-based plastics 1% 5%

separation
health standards for global recovery operations are available 2% 3%
16%
and implemented. HIPS
Non density-based ABS
The previous discussion has emphasized the human plastics separation PPO
PP or PE
systems aspects of electronics recycling systems. Effective 59% Other
20%
technologies for dealing with e-waste are emerging, which Post-processing

appear to be combinations of disassembly and bulk recycling
through reducing the product into pieces of a single or few
materials that can be separated using physical and chemical
properties. Electronic products, like cars, are a combination of
some valuable subcomponents and assemblies – such as the
central microprocessor or hard drive – and those that have
value only as materials, such as the printed circuit board or
housing. The recovery options that are pursued must balance
the costs of testing and disassembly, which tend to be labor
intensive, with the incremental value of the components over
their material value. The technological life cycle of a product
has a profound interaction with this decision. For example,
CRTs are a mature product for personal computers and have
experienced rapid declines in prices in order to compete with
liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that are penetrating the market.
The resale value of recovered CRTs is, therefore, very low in
their original markets. This discourages the testing and
refurbishment of CRTs and increases the need to recover the
leaded glass, metals, and plastics. However, as the market for
CRTs declines, leaded glass itself will become obsolete and
we will be faced with a disposal problem at a different level.
This problem is more complex for the computer itself, as
whole systems, or subsystems, can be reused and the
obsolescence rate for chips and fixed drives has slowed, but
prices for new components have continued to fall. A further
complication is that testing, disassembly, and bulk recycling
technologies scale in cost very differently with throughput.
Thus, for small scale operations that have been adopted to
deal with the historical flows of electronic products,
disassembly has been possible, but as the volumes, variability,
and age of systems increase, there will be a need to shift
toward higher throughput, less manually intensive operations.
Prototypical examples of separation processes that might
be considered for bulk electronics recycling are shown in
Fig. 2 Schematic of the recycling process and typical compositions of electronics waste.
Fig. 2. For any separation process, the two important issues
are to liberate the constituent materials, so that they are no
longer physically or chemically bonded to one another, and to
find the physical or chemical properties that most
differentiate these materials. The liberation of metals from
plastics is normally carried out by intensive shredding and
battering of the system to break the physical connectors,
such as screws and other fasteners. This also reduces the size
of the pieces. Metals can be separated by using their ferro- or
paramagnetic properties, before sending to smelters to
recover the metal fractions by liquid density. Sometimes this
can be done without any separation, just size reduction for
densification, with the combustible fraction (plastics)
recovered as energy. The recovery of energy from plastics is
potentially complicated by the presence of brominated fire-
retardants in the compounds and polyvinyl chloride plastics.
If metal separation is followed by plastics separation, these
materials can be recovered on the basis of differences in
density, hydrophobicity, spectra, solubility, or surface
polarity, as indicated in Table 1.
Case study: a US regional system
As part of our research, we have been working closely with
the State Legislature of the State of Georgia to understand
Table 1 Different mechanical separations options for plastics.
Property Plastics separation method
Density Dense medium separation (sink-float tanks/drums,
dense medium cyclones)
Hydrophobicity Froth flotation (mechanical tanks, flotation columns)
Polarity Electrostatic separation (free-fall, drum-type)
Spectra Spectroscopic separation (near infrared, mass, X-ray)
Solubility Selective dissolution by solvents

January 2004 43
 INSIGHT FEATURE

Fig. 5 Scenarios for the design of recycling infrastructure.

residential, which is TV-rich but with older equipment, as

Fig. 3 Possible recycling infrastructure choices for the State of Georgia.
the issues in designing an effective infrastructure for
recycling e-waste, specifically, TV and computer waste,
which makes up the bulk of the weight of electronic products
requiring recycling15. The approach starts by developing an
outline of the existing and possible recycling outlets for
materials in the state and adds possible collection points
based on a division into economic development regions.
The set of options is shown in Fig. 3. This is combined with
an overall pattern of the flow of material based on different
disposal channels, essentially commercial and government
sources, which tend to be large scale and TV-poor, or
shown in Fig. 4. As this article points out, there is significant
uncertainty associated with the flow of goods and the quality
of this flow. In addition, there may be economic development
opportunities associated with attracting a recycling
operation, such as CRT glass recycling, to the state. To
capture some of this uncertainty, we have developed sixteen
scenarios that represent the high and low extremes of four
parameters. These are: percentage participation by the
population, the percentage of usable TVs and computers with
monitors, and whether or not the CRT glass recycling can be
done out of state. The scenarios are given in Fig. 5. Optimal
networks are designed for each scenario, consisting of a
subset of processors and collection sites, and the flows of
products between them. The problem is resolved with the
objective of finding a robust system that would do well in
each different scenario, where the quality of a scenario is
measured by the deviation of the performance of a robust
system from the optimal value. The robust network is shown

Municipal Commercial
collection sites processing sites
Residential
source Residential
-TV, CPU, monitor end customers
Nonprofit
recycling sites

Commercial
source
-CPU, monitor

Recycler for large Commercial

commercial sources end customers
Commercial
source
-outside Georgia Main stream
Auxiliary stream

Fig. 4 Abstract flow of products from end consumers to recyclers.

44 January 2004

Fig. 6 Robust solution for recycling infrastructure in the State of Georgia.
in Fig. 6 and the objective function values for each individual
network and the robust network are shown in Fig. 7. The cost
structure for the system includes a $5.38 charge per item
entering the system. The results are encouraging, showing
that the robust network can do quite well compared to the
optimal value in all of the scenarios.
Conclusion
E-waste represents a challenging recycling problem for
several reasons. First, the material complexity of the product
– a combination of valuable metals with hazardous ones, such
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Demonstration Project, Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, 2001,
www.moea.state.mn.us/plugin/ElectronicsReport.pdf
INSIGHT FEATURE
4.5
4
Equ
Robust 16
Total profit (millions of $)
3.5
2.5
1.5
0.5
0
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15
Scenario
Fig. 7 Total annual profit (in dollars) of recycling systems for the State of Georgia, for
more details of assumptions15.
as Pb and Hg, and low value plastics – makes its diversion
from landfills an important consideration and one that will
continue to drive the development of environmentally sound
recycling processes. Second, it is a widely distributed and
diverse basket of consumer products with highly variable
rates of obsolescence and failure. This means that it is hard
to predict whether particular collection program types will be
cost effective in a given region and how much volume will be
generated. The next few years will see considerable growth in
the volume of electronic products being retired and an entire
reverse supply chain will have to be developed around them.
This will lead to challenges and opportunities for diverse
disciplines and companies. The question is: who will be the
Dell™ of recycling? MT
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2003
January 2004 45