Paul Vanegas

Active Disassembly for the End-of-Life Treatment of Flat Screen Televisions: Challenges and Opportunities

The principle of Active Disassembly (AD), in which innovative reversible fasteners can be simultaneously activated by an external trigger signal, enables a promising End-of-Life (EoL) treatment for electric and electronic products. Therefore, the economic and environmental constraints for implementing AD are discussed, as well as the information requirements for AD. Furthermore, the potential benefits of properly implementing active fasteners in a Liquid Cristal Display (LCD) and a Plasma Display Panel television are presented based on a case study.

Forecasting waste compositions: A case study on plastic waste of electronic display housings

Because of the rapid succession of technological developments, the architecture and material composition of many products used in daily life have drastically changed over the last decades. As a result, well-adjusted recycling technologies need to be developed and installed to cope with these evolutions. This is essential to guarantee continued access to materials and to reduce the ecological impact of our material consumption. However, limited information is currently available on the material composition of arising waste streams and even less on how these waste streams will evolve. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology to forecast trends in the material composition of waste streams. To demonstrate the applicability and value of the proposed methodology, it is applied to forecast the evolution of plastic housing waste from flat panel display (FPD) TVs, FPD monitors, cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs and CRT monitors. The results of the presented forecasts indicate that a wide variety of plastic types and additives, such as flame retardants, are found in housings of similar products. The presented case study demonstrates that the proposed methodology allows the identification of trends in the evolution of the material composition of waste streams. In addition, it is demonstrated that the recycling sector will need to adapt its processes to deal with the increasing complexity of plastics of end-of-life electronic displays while respecting relevant directives.

Product Clustering for Closed Loop Recycling of Flame Retardant Plastics: A Case Study for Flat Screen TVs

Closing material loops for the housing of electronic equipment remains a particular technical challenge because of the common use of Flame Retardant (FR) plastics. Within an industrial collaboration, series of experiments were setup to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of closed loop recycling of back covers of End-of-Life Flat screen TVs (FTVs). The results of these experiments show that the used type of plastic and FR is strongly producer dependent. Therefore, this paper proposes to cluster FTVs based on product brand to facilitate closed loop recycling of PC-ABS and HIPS-PPO with phosphorous FRs.

Ease of disassembly of products to support circular economy strategies

Graphical abstract

Improvement potential of today’s WEEE recycling performance: The case of LCD TVs in Belgium

Waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) constitutes one of the most relevant waste streams because of the quantity and presence of valuable materials. However, there is limited knowledge on the resource potential of urban mining WEEE, as data on material composition, and the efficiency of current recycling treatments are still scarce. In this article, an evaluation of the recycling performance at a national level for one of the fastest growing e-waste streams: LCD TVs is carried out through the following four steps. Firstly, material characterisation is performed by means of sampling of the waste stream. Secondly, a material flow analysis is conducted by evaluating the separation performance of a recycling plant in Belgium. Thirdly, the recovered economic value and avoided environmental impact (EI) of the analysed recycling system is assessed. Finally, the potential of urban mining for Belgium is forecasted. The analysis shows that while recycling performance for ferrous metals and aluminium are relatively high; there is substantial room to better close the material loops for precious metals (PM) and plastics. PMs and plastics account for 66 % of the economic value in LCD TVs and 57%of the EI.With the current, commonly applied recycling technology only one-third of the PM and housing plastics are recycled; meaning that for these materials, at a national level for Belgium, there is a potential for improvement that represents 3.3 million euros in 2016 and 6.8 million euros in 2025.