The construction of a collaborative-design platform to support waste electrical and electronic equipment recycling

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Abstract

Recycling of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is a very important subject not only from the viewpoint of waste treatment but also from the viewpoint of recovery of valuable materials. In the past, some obstacles make recycling challenging for today's manufactured products. First, it is difficult to gain all the information necessary to plan for the recycling evaluation, as most design information is owned and kept by suppliers. Another problem in recycling end-of-life (EOL) products is a lack of technologies to handle the very complex products that are being discarded today, because the knowledge of how to do so is owned by the recycler.

This research demonstrates how to support WEEE recycling analysis by environmental information with the part of bill of material. A collaborative-design platform is further constructed and collected all the needed information using computer-aided design (CAD), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and product life-cycle management (PLM) systems. Through this platform, suppliers are required to provide component information to enable the manufacturer's design for disassembly and recycling analysis. The results demonstrate that designers can obtain disassembly and recycling information through the model, so that desirable changes can be made in the early stages of a design. An industrial case study from Taiwan is also provided to demonstrate the use of this model.

Introduction

Today, rapidly growing concern for environmental protection and resource utilization has stimulated many new activities in the industrialized world for coping with urgent environmental problems created by the steadily increasing consumption of industrial products. One major problem is the disposal of obsolete products. In Western Europe, 6 million tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) were generated in 1998, and the amount of WEEE is expected to increase by at least 3–5% per annum [1]. To solve the environmental problems caused by end-of-life (EOL) products, governments are putting more and more pressure (in the form of increased regulations and restricted disposal options) on manufacturers to take on additional responsibility for their products and to recycle EOL products; this is called extended producer's responsibility (EPR) [2]. For example, the European Union has published environmental regulations and directives related to end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) [3] and WEEE [4]. Similarly, in the US, the California Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003 (also known as Senate Bills 20 and 50) has been established to ask to reduce the product's environmental impacts. One of the key elements of this act for product retailers and consumers is the Electronic Waste Recycling Fee, which is assessed at the time of sale, as defined for all covered electronic products [5].

Recycling of WEEE is a very important subject not only from the viewpoint of waste treatment but also from the viewpoint of valuable materials recovery [6]. However, some obstacles make recycling challenging for today's manufactured products. First, it is difficult to gain all the information necessary to plan for the recycling evaluation, as most design information is owned and kept by suppliers. Another problem in recycling EOL products is a lack of technologies to handle the very complex products that are being discarded today, because the knowledge of how to do so is owned by the recycler.

To solve these problems, several research studies have been published about disassembly planning and recycling issues [7], [8]. However, while these papers presented solutions for disassembly and recycling planning, they did not consider the design and manufacturing process. We believe recycling planning should be estimated when a product's bill of material (BOM) is determined. A BOM describes a product in terms of its assemblies, subassemblies, and basic parts. As companies work to support design for disassembly and recycling, they could directly consider the part's BOM data to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. In this manner, an evaluation of disassembly and recycling possibilities should integrate the enterprise's design flow, design process, and environmental management. Within the business community, ZyXEL [9] has demonstrated on its web site that how to integrate these elements. It emphasizes that enterprise should build a green information-collecting system and green management platform as part of its green design database (see Fig. 1).

This paper demonstrates how to support disassembly and recycling analysis in the industrial world. A collaborative-design platform is constructed and extended from computer-aided design (CAD), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and product life-cycle management (PLM) systems. Using the platform, suppliers exchange their design data (material selection, weight, and other environmental information) with customers over the internet, and CAD, ERP, and PLM systems are used to revise and integrate this information. The suppliers are required to provide their respective component information for the manufacturer's design for disassembly and recycling analysis. Designers can obtain the disassembly and recycling information, so that desirable changes can be made in the early stages of the design. An industrial case study from Taiwan is provided to demonstrate the use of this model.

Section snippets

Literature review

The recycling process for a product is determined based on how the product is disassembled. Two approaches may be used to disassemble components or materials: destructive and non-destructive. The most common method for destructive disassembly is shredding. In a shredder, scrap is compressed and fed into a drum, where it is ripped apart by a set of rotating hammers until the pieces are small enough to drop through an output grid. Then, lightweight materials (e.g., textiles and some plastics) are

Framework of the research

This paper presents a collaborative-design model to aid in design for disassembly and recycling. This approach proposed an efficient method for disassembly planning and recycling analysis that designers can use during the design stage. The framework is shown in Fig. 3.

Case study

In this research, the collaborative-platform system was implemented in an original-brand manufacturer (OBM) in Taiwan on a pilot run in this company. The software development uses the VB script and the CAD system (Pro/engineer).

Conclusions

Today, recycling is gaining increasing attention on a world-wide basis. Product designers and engineers are faced with a major challenge: they must be able to investigate the consequences of their decisions not only on all aspects of a product's primary life cycle, but also on its secondary life cycles. Designing for disassembly and recycling based on life-cycle engineering could reduce costs for the user and society, in general, due to environmental, occupational health, and resource

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan, for partially supporting this research under the Contract no. NSC 95-2621-Z-159-001.

References (19)

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