Smart and sustainable supply chain management: a proposal to use rfid to improve electronic waste management

Due to the accelerated expansion of technology and improved living standards, electronic product use is increasing exponentially, and this has resulted in rapid degradation of the environment. A large number of waste cell phones were generated in the past few years. According to statistics, the global number of cell phone subscribers exceeded 7 billion in 2015. This increase indicates that there are a huge number of retired cell phones. According to available data, nearly 400 million waste cell phones are generated each year in the world. Of these, only 1 percent are recycled properly, and the collection rate in the US is between 10 and 20 percent. This improper disposal of waste cell phones is posing a great threat to the environment and human health because cell phones contains toxins that have been associated with severe health problems. Meanwhile, proper recycling of cell phones is likely to generate high profits. In this paper, we first identify the root causes of the low return rate of cell phones and take a design science approach to solving the problem. We reject the traditional assumption that return rate is exogenous in nature and suggest a novel recovery system to control the return rate of obsolete cell phones. The proposed system uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to improve the end of life/end of use (EOL/EOU) management of cell phones. A mathematical model is formulated for the proposed system to minimize the cost of the system and a numerical example also given. Managerial insights are given to assist the designer of the system in some critical decisions. © 2018, Curran Associates Inc. All rights reserved.