Treatment and recycling system optimisation with activity-based costing in WEEE reverse logistics management: an environmental supply chain perspective

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) reverse logistics management has increasingly received much attention in recent years not only because of the fast increase of WEEE but also the legislations in many developed countries. This paper focuses on the treatment and recycling system, and proposes a two-stage multi-objective decision framework. In the treatment stage, the responsible producer selects treatment suppliers under extended producer responsibility by a pre-emptive goal programming model. After the wastes are depolluted and transformed to recyclable materials, the process enters the recycling stage in which the decision-maker plans the reclaimed material production by a linear programming model for profit maximisation. An illustrative case study is presented, and the sensitivity analyses show that the ranking of suppliers is more stable than the quantities allocated to suppliers under different priority structures, so ranking of suppliers should also be given attention in such multi-objective decision-making. In addition, a decision model with environmental constraints can reduce the production of the products that have more environmental impacts.