Sustainability and end-of-life product management: A case study of electronics collection scenarios

The National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI) was established by the US EPA to examine issues associated with electronics recycling, engage in discussions to build consensus among all stakeholder groups, and recommend a strategy for developing a national electronics recycling program. One of the outcomes of this effort was a set of guidelines describing a base level of service for collection and recycling which would apply across the country. Fundamental to the concept of base level of service is sustainability - the need to balance societal concerns for end-of-life product management with system cost-effectiveness and environmentally-sound operational strategies. The Sustainability Target Method (STM), developed in close collaboration between Lucent Bell Labs and the Multi-lifecycle Engineering Research Center at NJIT, is used to evaluate various alternative collection scenarios. The key and unique feature of the STM is that it links the economic value of a system with its environmental impact by defining the relative indicator Resource Productivity (RP) for impact and the absolute indicator Eco-Efficiency (EE) for sustainability, thereby providing practical sustainability criteria for evaluation.