Assessment of a reverse logistics framework for waste printed circuit boards (WPCB) in Brazil

Abstract

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (e-waste) has a high market value concentrated in waste printed circuit boards (WPCB). In Brazil, the absence of industrial processing units to recover valuable elements from WPCBs leads to the export of a large part of this waste, generating a loss of value for the country and environmental impacts. In this context, this thesis aims to quantify these impacts in economic terms, emissions and demanded energy and propose an alternative reverse logistics model to enable the recovery of value from WPCB in Brazil. The baseline scenario (export of the formal fraction of WPCBs) and the alternative scenario (installation of processing units for these materials in the country) were compared with the support of geoprocessing tools. The main results pointed to the cities of São Paulo, Salvador and Manaus as potential clusters for WPCBs recycling. Furthermore, emissions, demand energy and costs in the baseline scenario exceeded by 7.2, 31.9 and 4.5 times the alternative scenario, respectively. The simulation indicated that the revenues from processing WPCBs were 24.7 times higher than the total costs in the alternative scenario, enabling around 93,590 jobs for the country. Therefore, this study highlighted that the WPCB processing in Brazil is more advantageous under economic and environmental perspectives than exporting these high added value materials to foreign recyclers, which might be a possible trend for advances in the e-waste reverse logistics in the country.