A Closed-Loop Reverse Supply Chain Network Design for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment

Abstract

Nowadays, firms are choosing strategies that increase their economic performance as well as their competitiveness in the field of social responsibility. Interest in the effective reuse of resources and/or manufactured products continues to increase in all companies as a result of global climatic changes, population growth, rapid urbanization, and the reduction of natural resources. This study proposes a sustainable multi-period reverse logistics network design to minimize the waste of electric and electrical equipment, which is the one of the most crucial sectors in terms of waste management. This study contributes to filling the gap in the literature on mathematical closed-loop reverse logistics network design by including multi-product, multi-objective, and multi-period parameters in the model for all three dimensions of sustainability for decision making. The proposed model is optimized with mixed integer linear programming. It is applied to a sample data set and sensitivity analysis is done with crucial decision variables to reveal the model limitations. The study ends by presenting the future directions, giving some helpful recommendations for other researchers on this topic.