Reuse and recycle of End-of-Life (EOL) Tablets

Supervisor: Y.C. Chan Course Code: EE6613 Title of Report:Reuse and recycle of End-of-Life (EOL) - Tablets

Report Date:

Name: WEN Qianqian

Student ID: 54169831

Supervisor: Course Code : Title of Report: Report Date: Name ： Student ID ：

1.Introduction and Situation

1.1 Introduction

Electronic equipment has become more and more popular in our modern daily life. They facilitate our life and make our days more colorful. We now have TVs in the home, GPS navigators in the car, cell phones and tablet in the bags, the laptops on the desks.

Nowadays, the speed of update and replacement of electronic products is faster than our imagination. As a result, the electronic waste increased rapidly during the past two decades. We can find the data of computer obsolete from late 1990s to 2000s ina lot of documents. It shows that around 20 million computers were discarded in the late 1990s while more than 100,000 computers became obsolete every day in the early 2000s.

EoL stands for End of Life. It represents the last section of a product’s life. EoL management includes be responsible for disposing of the existing product, transitioning to a new product and minimizing the damage to the environment. Finding a cost-efficient and environment-friendly method for tablet recovery and recycling is a urgent issue globally.

1.2 Situation

The amount of electronic waste has boosted as a consequence of the development of the industrialization. It is highly possible that large amount of e-waste will lead to heavy environment pollutions. The materials and chemical components in the e-waste are dangerous as they could do harm to both the human bodies and the biological system. If the toxic elements are abandoned or processed in an incorrect way, the soil and water will be polluted which will do harm to other creatures in the food chain. Thus, the management and recycling of

the electronic waste is becoming a worldwide environment protection issue which is emphasized by the UN and a lot of international organizations.

Some countries have started to solve the electronic waste problems by making legislations and laws. The WEEE Directive and the RoHS Directive are all implemented by the EU who puts the environmental protection plan into practice as a vanguard.

EU also recommended the concept of recycling and reusage to the manufacturers in order to make them have the awareness of the EoL management during the production process. It means that the manufacturers are encouraged to improve their design and technology of the product which will be easier to recycle, reuse and disassemble.

Tablets are a kind of unique product in all e-wastes. Not only because they have large volume and relevant short lifespan, but also because high possibility of recycling and reuse they have. It is important to strengthen the awareness of EoL management in the tablet design and manufacturing process. It will save a lot of the cost during the disposeof the e-waste.

2.Goals and Method

2.1 Goals

Tablets are the most trendy electronic equipment in the modern days. Their popularity has been increased because of their unique features. They share almost the same functions with the PCs. However, they are much lighter and more portable compared to the common ones. The basic components of the a tablet are touchscreen, processor, memory, hard drive and integrated motherboard. The touch screens are touch-sensitive. The screens are capable of display brilliant color pictures and high-quality videos which should be suitable for professional presentations. The CPU should be low-power consumption and high-octane calculation. The memory depends on the users. If the users want to

do video editing on their tablets, they need larger RAM such as 4GB. The hard drive space in the tablet is held to minimum as they are normally used to do online work. An integrated motherboard should be equipped in the tablet which includes different kinds of cards and ports. All the components havespecific methods for recycling and recovery.

2.2 Basic Concept

Nowadays, the EoL product management can be divided into three main steps: Collection, fate determination and processing.The processing steps also includes three different part: reuse of tablets, reuse of components and recycling of materials.（出处）During the management process, it is essential to use effective analysis method. The manufacturer should consider the economic and environmental influence in their management. It means that cost control should be considered by the manufacturers.

The waste solution part can be waste management, waste prevention, source reduction, recycling and waste combustion and land-filling. The waste management includes minimizing the impact and the waste prevention focus on minimizing the volume. Among them, the most important part is minimizing the volume. We can do chemically or biologically treat or incinerate, recycle and compost as much waste as possible, reuse as many things as possible, reduce waste and pollution and bury what is left. During the recycling process, we focus on five kinds of materials: CRTs, circuit boards, batteries, PCBs and EOL equipment.Before recycling, some special issues should benoticed.Firstly, the reused materials should be refurbished and tested for functionality and residual focus materials are managed responsibly. Secondly, personal data on the EoL electronics should be cleared and destroyed.

There are some differences of reuse and recycle. The concept of reuse is when a product that is newly purchased is put to another use after the first use is completed. It will do big contribution to the environment because it eliminates the

need to buy another new product. This will also decrease the consumption of the natural resource. Recycle is a processing of used materials into new products to avoid waste of potentially useful materials. The waste will be converted into new materials for the new product. Recycling helps reduce the consumption of energy usage and environmental pollution by using disposable materials.

2.3 Method

Collection and transportation are first two steps when doing recycling process. In this section, recyclers need to choose the player and the program, collection channel and transportation method. The collection method can be divided in three main kinds. They are drop-off bins, mail in and e-waste collection events. After doing collection, the transportation will send the e-waste to the reception of EoL tablets to do the next steps.

Once the collected tablets reach the accepting facilities, they go through a pre-processing step. The pre-processing stage can also be separated into three steps. The first step is removal of accessories and battery, the second step is screening and the third step is fate decision and sorting. The materials will go to the second use process or materials recovery process after sorted. The employees are required to be familiar with the knowledge of different model and technology of electronic equipment in the market. The facilities which are used in screening and fate determination are all highly advanced with fast and accurate calculation ability. In the pre-processing, the calculation and computation should obey specific international standard. One of the screening method is IMEI. The method helps analyze what to do with each tablet according to a certain criteria. After the analysis, the reuse method of the tablet will be determined.

After pre-processing, the recycler need to classify the reuse of the tablet and the reuse of the component.The tablets will undergo cosmetic and functional tests in terms of being reuse as tablets. If the tablets pass the test, the software will be

update and the surface will be cleaned and polished. They will go back to the market afterwards. If the tablet fail in the test, the worthy of refurbish will be considered. If the values are confined, the tablet will be refurbished and then do the software update. If there is no market for the tablets, they will be transported to the component recovery process.

When the tablet comes to the component recovery step, they are first disassembled. The disassembly process can be automated or manual. However, during these years, most of the companies still rely on manual labor as the operations should be precise. After disassembly, the component with economic value will be recovery and made quality assurance before sending back to the market. However, materials without economic profit will not be be recovered. The most profitable materials in the tablets are base and precious metal such as copper. Generally, the e-waste recyclers will collect and classify the EoL tablets, and send them to large-scale metal smelters and refineries for component recovery. All of the recycling steps are shown in the following graph.

Figure 1: Process overview

Nowadays, the manufacturers and retailers also offer several options to recycle the electronic equipment. According to the popularization of the tablet, the manufacturers and retailers will offer tablet recycling.（出处）

Figure2: The Recycling Service Provided By Manufacturers

3.Analysis and Outcomes

3.1Economic and environmental performance

Economic performance and environment performance are two most important factors in the EoL management. For tablet, the second hand market is still in a developing stage. As the market develops, the environment performance is expected to improve at the same stage. The issue of keeping the balance of high economic profit and less environment burden should be stressed when doing the EoL management. There are four sections in both the economic and environment performance evaluation: collection and transportation, pre-processing, reuse option and recycling option.

In collection and transportation process, the collection cost account for a large potion of this process. Actually, the recyclers today prefer the cost-efficient mail-in way to collect high-value tablets although it is not environment-friendly. However,

a new trend of collecting old and non-working product is becoming popular as it will reduce the landfill and incineration of e-waste. In the pre-process stage, the manual sorting is the largest cost. As a result, a lot of recyclers plan to invest semi-automatic sorting technology. The major environmental burdens come from energy consumption and emissions. In the reuse and recycling field, the economic and environment performance are always effected by the market. The economic value is determined by the model, age and condition of the tablets. However, since the second-hand component market is still under the development, it is hard to find a method both do benefit to the economic and environment performance.

3.2Outcomes

During the reuse and recycling process of tablets, collecting high-quality tablets will help improve the economic profit. Meanwhile, following the strategy of eco-design and e-waste recycling will help improve the environment performance. In conclusion, the quality of EoL phones, the collection rate and method and the recycling disposal method all have influence on the outcomes. Additionally, all process come with environment burdens. The transportation and energy requirement, energy requirement and waste disposal are all factors which should be considered when evaluate the impact on the environment.