Minimizing reverse logistic costs for electronic products

Rapid technology advances have shortened the lifecycle of electronic products, resulting in the increasing number of discarded products in recent years. Due to thegrowing environmental concerns, the countries want to reduce amount of waste stream. So their wastes need to be properlycollected, sorted, and then they can be transferred according totheir conditions to these places: repairing, recycling, refurbishing and disposal. This paper presents a mathematical programmingmodel which minimizes the total cost of multiple types of waste ofelectrical and electronic products (WEEPs). The monetary factors considered in the model include the costs of loading and unloading, subsidy, fixed, operation and transportation. Based onthe proposed model, the optimal facility locations and the material flows in the reverse logistic network can be determined. at the end, a numerical example is illustrated to gain a better insight into the proposed model.