Assessing WEEE sustainability potential with a hybrid customer-centric forecasting framework

Abstract

Along the line of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) recovery, customers are the ultimate decision-makers to determine the destinies of the end-of-life (EoL) electronic products. However, inadequacies exist and those are WEEE collection and generation predictions considering uncertain customers’ behavior and deepening discussion of the influence discrepancies of customers’ behavior between an advanced and a fledging recovery system. To bridge these research gaps, this paper aims to propose a customer-centric approach to forecasting the WEEE collection and generation amounts in Taiwan (i.e., a developed recovery system) and Vietnam (i.e., an developing recovery system), respectively, and analysing the influence disparities from these two societies. First, the combination of grey relational analysis (GRA) and principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to deal with factors reflecting customers’ behavior. Second, the forecast model, the grey neural network (NN) optimized by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA), is developed to estimate the collection and generation amounts of waste home appliances during 2021-2030 in Taiwan and Vietnam. The collection amount in Taiwan is predicted to increase 2-fold until 2030 and the generation amount in Vietnam increases 6-fold. Moreover, different types of waste home appliances show distinct growth trends. The framework shows the capability to cope with nonlinear and uncertain characteristics and realize high accuracy. Based on the predictions, this paper quantifies the potential sustainability improvement given that realization of a well-established recovery system and a high recycling rate. The total revenue from recovery is estimated to reach 300 million in Taiwan by 2030, and 1.2 billion in Vietnam. Additionally, by 2030 the CO2e emissions in Taiwan are expected to reduce 0.7 million tons and in Vietnam will be reduction of 3.5 million tons. Socially, around 400-500 job vacancies can be created in Taiwan and more than 7000 jobs created in Vietnam in 2030 to achieve effective WEEE collection. The result facilitates the decision-making of the involved industries and regulators for better WEEE management and infrastructure investment. Besides, to have the collection trend in an advanced system (e.g., Taiwan) as a reference, it brightens the way to build and improve a formal collection system in a developing country or region (e.g., Vietnam).