Electronic products recovery—PAWS, a BRITE-EURAM project

Abstract

Legislative, customer and consumer pressures are increasingly being brought to bear on the manufacturers of electronic products to take back their product at end-of-life. There are economic, legal, organisational, business, and technological issues associated with product take-back. These issues can not be addressed by applying the techniques of manufacturing and distribution. The technological issues of resource recovery may broadly be seen as relating to: material design and selection and product design; process technologies and process design; product and production; supply chain management, design and logistics and information systems. Resource recovery issues affect the entire product life cycle, from design to final disposition,27 and extensive work is required that will provide understanding of the business, organisation, management and control of take-back, the information system requirements of resource recovery and the technology requirements to facilitate the return and processing of electronic products at end-of-life. The Product Acquisition from Waste Streams (PAWS) project is a BRITE-EURAM project that aims to provide industry with an understanding of resource recovery in terms of business models and objectives and to provide industry with prototype tools—information systems—that support resource recovery.