On a medium term product recovery and disposal strategy for durable assembly products

The introduction of extended producer responsibility makes original equipment manufacturers formally responsible for take-back, recovery and reuse of discarded products. One of their key problems is to determine to what extent return products must be disassembled and which recovery and disposal options should be applied. On a tactical management level, this involves anticipating problems like meeting (legislative) recovery targets, limited secondary end markets and investments in recycling infrastructure. In this paper, a comprehensive model is presented, which determines an optimal product recovery and disposal strategy for one product type. The objective function takes into account technical, commercial and ecological criteria as well as uncertainty on these criteria due to lack of information, in particular regarding the quality level. Optimization is done on overall net profit and occurs using a two-phased DP-algorithm. The applicability of the model is shown in a case study.