An Operations Perspective on Product Take-back Legislation for e-waste: Theory, Practice, and Research Needs

A growing stream of environmental legislation enforces collection and recycling of used electrical and electronics products. Based on our experiences with producers coping with e-waste legislation, the authors find that there is a strong need for research on the implications of such legislation from an operations perspective. In particular, as a discipline at the interface of systems design and economic modeling, operations focused research can be extremely useful in identifying appropriate e-waste take-back implementations for different business environments and how producers should react to them.