Sustainable reverse logistics scorecards for the performance measurement of informal e-waste businesses

Driving sustainable circular economy in electronics: A comprehensive review on environmental life cycle assessment of e-waste recycling

E-waste, encompassing discarded materials from outdated electronic equipment, often ends up intermixed with municipal solid waste, leading to improper disposal through burial and incineration. This improper handling releases hazardous substances into water, soil, and air, posing significant risks to ecosystems and human health, ultimately entering the food chain and water supply. Formal e-waste recycling, guided by circular economy models and zero-discharge principles, offers potential solutions to this critical challenge. However, implementing a circular economy for e-waste management due to chemical and energy consumption may cause environmental impacts. Consequently, advanced sustainability assessment tools, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), have been applied to investigate e-waste management strategies. While LCA is a standardized methodology, researchers have employed various routes for environmental assessment of different e-waste management methods. However, to the authors' knowledge, there lacks a comprehensive study focusing on LCA studies to discern the opportunities and limitations of this method in formal e-waste management strategies. Hence, this review aims to survey the existing literature on the LCA of e-waste management under a circular economy, shedding light on the current state of research, identifying research gaps, and proposing future research directions. It first explains various methods of managing e-waste in the circular economy. This review then evaluates and scrutinizes the LCA approach in implementing the circular bioeconomy for e-waste management. Finally, it proposes frameworks and procedures to enhance the applicability of the LCA method to future e-waste management research. The literature on the LCA of e-waste management reveals a wide variation in implementing LCA in formal e-waste management, resulting in diverse results and findings in this field. This paper underscores that LCA can pinpoint the environmental hotspots for various pathways of formal e-waste recycling, particularly focusing on metals. It can help address these concerns and achieve greater sustainability in e-waste recycling, especially in pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical pathways. The recovery of high-value metals is more environmentally justified compared to other metals. However, biometallurgical pathways remain limited in terms of environmental studies. Despite the potential for recycling e-waste into plastic or glass, there is a dearth of robust background in LCA studies within this sector. This review concludes that LCA can offer valuable insights for decision-making and policy processes on e-waste management, promoting environmentally sound e-waste recycling practices. However, the accuracy of LCA results in e-waste recycling, owing to data requirements, subjectivity, impact category weighting, and other factors, remains debatable, emphasizing the need for more uncertainty analysis in this field.

Investigating the Drivers of the Reverse Logistics Implementation in Reducing Waste in Vietnam

Reverse logistics systems are now acknowledged as being crucial for enterprises to enhance their overall financial and environmental performance, particularly in developing nations where they face more challenges on both fronts. The majority of researchers examined drivers and barriers to implementation in developed nations. This study aims to investigate the main factors that positively influence the practice of reverse logistics in a developing country such as Vietnam. The study employed a sample of 287 managers within 5 industries. According to the findings, 4 key factors influenced the reverse logistics implementation in developing countries: economic drivers, competitive drivers, outsourcing drivers, and environmental drivers. Regulation drivers and reputation drivers have little influence on reverse logistics performance, contrary to predictions. The findings help scholars in understanding the factors influencing reverse logistics operations in emerging nations. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate differences in the drivers of reverse logistics execution in developing and developed countries.

Sustainability performance evaluation of the E-waste closed-loop supply chain with the SCOR model

From a sustainability perspective, the performance of a company's supply chain will be satisfactory when it has reached in all aspects a desirable eco-environmentally friendly level. Assessing the sustainability performance in the closed-loop e-waste supply chain becomes vital because its activities are primarily targeted towards sustainability goals related to the process of production, supply, recycling, and disposal of electrical components. This study evaluates the performance of e-waste supply chain sustainability and identifies its performance indicators as a framework for evaluating supply chain performance using the Best-Worst Method (BWM), which is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. For this, the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model is considered the basic performance evaluation reference. Moreover, through reviewing the literature, the complementary indicators of this model, especially in terms of sustainability, are added to the performance evaluation indices using the Nominal Group Technique (NGT). After specifying and forming a performance evaluation hierarchy, the BWM method is used to determine the criteria score. The results of implementing the framework on some well-known supply chains in New Zealand indicate that the attributes of "Costs," "Quality," and "GreenScor" are crucial for achieving high performance, while in this developed country, there is less concern about social issues.