NEW REVENUE STREAMS Around the world, 30 to 50 million tons of
electronic devices are tossed away every year. That volume of e-waste is expected to increase by three to five percent per year as consumers demand more and more ‘smart’ products. The paper presents a comprehensive framework supporting the decision-making process of multiple electronic recycling centres. The European Union has made it a priority
to work towards a circular economy, (see SHM this time last year) in which wastes are increasingly recognised as resources, and it’s clear from the new work that such an effort makes good sense when it comes to economics. Professor Koh and her co- authors estimate potential revenues from recycled e-waste at more than €2 billion in the year 2014. The value associated with those recycled resources is expected to rise by the year 2020 to more than €3.5 billion. The team have also developed a
methodology to help organisations identify these key materials and to prioritise their investment in materials recovery based on factors including the amount of materials that are available in waste streams, their material composition, the price volatility of recovered materials, degree of purity required, and more. They have relied on their methodology to evaluate the potential revenues from the recovery of fourteen popular e-products, including LCD and LED notebooks, TVs, computer monitors, cell phones and solar panels. The recycling of electronic waste
products promises to reduce environmental pollution by conserving virgin resources, which are required for the manufacturing of high-tech consumer products as well as for aerospace, automotive and other industries. As the demand for these limited resources continues to rise, industry will be left with little choice but to capture recycled materials for manufacturing to meet the demand for their new products. That sounds like a number of
opportunities worth a closer look to me!
We are grateful to world-leading publishing and information provider, Elsevier, for readers of Skip Hire Magazine to be given open access to the award-winning paper and associated documentation. The article is entitled Recycling of
WEEEs: An economic assessment of present and future e-waste streams by Federica Cucchiella, Idiano D’Adamo, S.C. Lenny Koh, Paolo Rosa It is published in Renewable and
Sustainable Energy Reviews (Volume 51, November 2015) DOI: doi:10.1016/j. rser.2015.06.010 and available on ScienceDirect via the link: www.
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1364032115005808
34
SHM December 2015/January 2016 Issue 121
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