The economics of cell phone reuse and recycling

By Roland Geyer, V. Doctori Blass. 2010

319 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is widespread consensus that landfill of waste electronic and electric equipment is not an acceptable end-of-use management option. Diversion from landfill, either through voluntary or mandatory take-back and collection programs, overwhelmingly leads to the recycling of e-waste, which typically consists of the recovery of a limited number of metals. Cell phones are currently one of the few electronic products, if not the only one, that also have a thriving reuse market. In fact, more handsets are reused than recycled. Cell phones therefore offer the rare opportunity to compare closed-loop supply chains for e-waste reuse and recycling. In this paper, we examine the economics of cell phone reuse and recycling based on detailed primary data collected from reverse logistics, reuse and recycling operations in 2003 in the UK and in 2006 in the US. We show that while cell phone reuse has a healthy profit margin, handset recycling is currently a by-product of reuse.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/666d7161296a74828a19fe6f32fbf7d453d4bb85

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Impact of Take‐Back Regulation on the Remanufacturing Industry (2017, background): “Geyer and Blass (2010) ﬁnd that cost of recycling per phone is $0.18 whereas revenue per phone is $0.75, therefore total cost is 0.18 (cid:2) 0.75 = (cid:2) $0.57.”
Material efficiency strategies to reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with buildings, vehicles, and electronics—a review (2019, background): “Geyer and Blass [201] investigatedmobile phone reuse and recycling froman economic point of view concluding that reuse is the largest driver of end-of-use handset collection and recycling is a by-product.”
Economic and Environmental Assessment of Remanufacturing Strategies for Product + Service Firms (2014, methodology): “These ranges were used based on industry averages of reuse rates in the secondary cell phone market (Doc-tori Blass et al. 2006, Geyer and Doctori Blass 2010).”
Recycling of WEEEs: An economic assessment of present and future e-waste streams (2015, background): “Table 3 tries to quantify these values, by considering both literature works [23,26,29,30,41,42,50–52] and market reports (IDC – Analyse the Future, IMS Research, Statista – The Statistics Portal, Value Market Research), by considering two different scenarios related to the European market:”
How Does Product Recovery Affect Quality Choice? (2013, background): “In addition to relatively low reverse logistics costs, cell phones also contain a signiﬁcant amount of precious metals, so that recycling of cell phones is, in many instances, a proﬁtable operation (Geyer and Doctori Blass 2010).”
Reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain: A comprehensive review to explore the future (2015, background): “Geyer and Blass (2010) presented detailed economic data on cell phone collection, reuse, and recycling.”