Dergi makalesi Açık Erişim

Locating recycling facilities for IT-based electronic waste in Turkey

2015    Aras, Necati; Korugan, Aybek; Buyukozkan, Gulcin; Serifoglu, Funda Siyrikaya; Erol, Ismail; Velioglu, Meltem Nurtanis

Turkey passed a directive on waste electric and electronic equipments in May 2012, which has been in effect since May 2013. This directive, like its counterparts in other countries such as the one in the European Union, holds producers and distributors responsible for the collection and recovery of a wide variety of end-of-use or end-of-life electronic products discarded by the consumers. The collection and recovery activities have to be planned and carried out with the help of municipalities. The success of this directive lies in the establishment of an efficient reverse logistics network design for the collection and recovery operations. An important component of this initiative is to determine the locations and capacities of recycling facilities that will handle the returned products with the objective of minimizing the total cost of opening facilities, operating them, and transporting the discarded products from their collection points to the facilities. We develop a multi-period capacitated facility location-allocation model that is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program. Since there is uncertainty in the number of used products that will be collected from the consumers, we generate a set of scenarios and try to obtain a solution with the objective of minimizing the maximum regret associated with the occurrence of different scenarios. The developed mathematical programming model is solved using estimates of discarded personal computers, inkjet and laserjet printers in 15 major cities of Turkey during the period 2013-2018. These estimates are based on real data that consist of scrapped items of these three types of products from 2007 to 2012. The results indicate that the best locations for opening recycling facilities are the largest three cities-of Turkey, i.e., Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. We perform additional experiments to quantify the benefit of constructing a multi-period model rather than a static one. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.