TITLE:
MEMRECS—A Sustainable View for Metal Recycling from Waste Printed Circuit Boards
AUTHORS:
Hoang-Long Le, Eiji Yamasue, Hideyuki Okumura, Keiichi N. Ishihara
KEYWORDS:
PCBs; Environmental Impacts; Natural Resources Conservation; Metal Recyclability
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.4 No.8,
August
5,
2013
ABSTRACT: This study analyses the metal
recyclability from waste Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) with three material
recycling quoting approaches: Material Recycling Efficiency (MRE), Resource
Recovery Efficiency (RRE), and Quotes for Environmentally Weighted
Recyclability (QWERTY). The results indicate that MRE is likely inapplicable to
quoting the metal recyclability of waste PCBs because it makes the recycling of
any metal is equal to each other (e.g. recycling of 1 kg of gold is as
important as recycling of 1 kg of iron). RRE and QWERTY can overcome the poor
yardstick of MRE because they concern not only the weight of recycled materials
but also the contribution of recycled materials to the natural resource
conservation and the environmental impact reduction, respectively. These two approaches,
however, report an extremely different result, that makes the target
stakeholders get confused with which material recycled. From the findings of
the aforementioned analysis, this study proposes the Model for Evaluating Metal
Recycling Efficiency from Complex Scraps (MEMRECS) as a new approach to quotes
the metal recycling performance. MEMRECS allows a trade-offs between three
criteria: mass, environmental impacts and natural resources conservation, hence
it can provide the result in a sustainable sound manner. MEMRECS clearly models
and enhances the role of natural resources conservation aspect rather than
QWERTY does.