Manufacturer`s information value in the de-manufacturing oriented circular economy

With the sharp slop of the technology growth and presenting the new models, versions, and technologically improved products, we are observing a new trend of products’ usage, which means the products’ life in the consumption phase is becoming shorter than before. With a high-level of production rate, and product’s short life, it can be understood that we are facing a huge number of end-of-life products. The concept of circular economy has been generated to cope with this problem. It tries to make a closed loop of manufacturing, usage, end returning the End-of-Life (EOL) products to the first point of manufacturing state to be used as a resource of raw materials or even be reused. The feasibility of the circular economy fulfilment in each kind of industry, is limited to some constraints, such as the lack of needed information and the proper way of exploiting the relevant information. In order to close the loop of circular economy, there should be some motivations for different influential parties who are present in the whole life-cycle of a product in circular economy concept. The most powerful motivation for the main players who are able to either provide or exploit the information, is the economic value which could be achieved by providing or exploiting it. Hence the aim of this thesis is to assess what the needed data and information are that would be beneficial for treating the EOL products and also how they could be exploited in a way that the manufacturers as the data providers and the de-manufacturers or recyclers as the data and information users, could take the advantage of and generate a margin from? The work has been done by focusing on the Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) as one of the most important products in the electric and electronic industry. The PCB manufacturing and EOL PCB’s possible de-manufacturing procedures have been studied and as a result, all the needed data and information regarding their treatments are presented. As far as the data exploitation is concerned, a general algorithm related to EOL PCB’s possible treatments is designed to optimize the EOL PCB’s treatment and based on which, an economic model is designed. It firstly suggests the most profitable procedure to treat the different PCBs with different EOL conditions. Consequently, as a result of evaluating a big number of various conditions of a few types of PCBs by the “Economic Model”, the generated margin of treating the EOL PCBs with the presence of data is compared with the basic treatment (recycling) of PCBs without the presence of any data.