A Process-Based Cost Model to Improve Informal Recycling of End-of-Life Electronics
Open AccessElectronic waste (e-waste) is a growing economic opportunity for informal recycling operations in developing countries, while it is a major health and environmental concern for the developed world. Currently, only 25% of gold in e- waste is recovered successfully through informal recycling practices (Keller, 2006; Rochat et al., 2007). This low rate of recovery means that informal end-of-life (EoL) recycling of e-waste is economically unsustainable. This project contributes to the study of e-waste and e-waste management by developing a process-based cost model (PBCM) for an informal recycling facility, in order to identify cost drivers in the system and increase revenue. An informal facility at Bangalore, India was used as the case study, to identify different processes used for informal recycling of e-waste. These include manual separation, dismantling, and shredding, use of acids to extract precious metals, and heat-extrusion processing of scrap plastic. Other factors evaluated were the cost, process drivers for revenue, the material composition of the e-waste present at the facility, the duration of e-waste storage, and the effects of climatic conditions in the region, such as the average annual rainfall.The model was validated by comparing the output data to known values collected in the field, using hypothesis testing, confidence interval, and effect size calculations. To identify statistically significant differences in processing time, and recovery rate when PBCM was used, a paired t-test analysis was carried out. The result showed that processing time decrease with the utilization of PBCM, while the recovery rate increased, the ability of the model to identify alternative processing path and use sensitivity analysis to identify variation of this parameters played a key role. The magnitudes of the differences were large, as evaluated using Cohen’s d and correlation factor (r).
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