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

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. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.