Recycling e-waste: A solution through third party recycler

With 50 million metric tons of e-waste disposed worldwide each year, e-waste recycling has become an increasingly important issue globally. The U.S. alone generated a total of 3.01 million tons of e-waste in 2007, of which only 13.6% was recycled. Improper disposal of e-waste poses an immediate and prominent threat to environmental and public health. Many electronic vendors have initiated either the Expended Producer Responsibility or the Producer Stewardship and launched manufacturer-sponsored recycling programs. Many of these programs, however, are in trouble because of the fee generated for recycling, thereby blocking the road for effective actions. In this paper, we propose a third party recycler model as an alternative solution to e-waste recycling. The third party recycler works as the intermediary between consumers (source of e-waste) and electronic vendors (recipient of recycled items) to recycle disposed electronics properly. The proposed information system is composed of five modules and supports the business operations and functionalities of the third party recycler. We hope the third party recycler structure will be adopted globally in the near future.