Sustainable management of electronic waste: Empirical evidences from a stakeholders' perspective

Abstract

With rapid advancements in technology, the evolution and demand for electronic/ electric devices have drastically increased. The exponential increase in the use of technology to fulfill the needs of the fast-paced information era has led to electronic and electrical devices being discarded or disposed of at a faster rate than in the past. This phenomenon has resulted in e-waste becoming the fastest-growing form of solid waste. E-waste is classified as hazardous waste and can be harmful to the environment and health if not disposed of responsibly. Therefore, alternatives, such as exporting, landfilling, and recycling (from different economic, social, technical, and environmental criteria), are of interest to minimize the disposal of this toxic waste form into landfill sites. The analytic hierarchy process approach was deployed to evaluate and prioritize alternatives for e-waste processing systems in the United Arab Emirates context. The obtained results indicate that recycling has the highest priority among the studied alternatives in the e-waste processing system. The low economic and environmental awareness of stakeholders with regard to e-waste shows that e-waste management system initiatives must be expedited to adhere to e-waste best practices implemented nationally and internationally.analytic hierarchy process (AHP), e-waste, e-waste management (EWM), integrated sustainable solid waste management (ISSWM), sustainablity, United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Global research into the relationship between electronic waste and health over the last 10 years: A scientometric analysis

“…The following steps can be taken to avoid electronic waste that can be harmful to human health: (1) Prevent the generation of electronic pollutants at the source, identify what hazardous substances are in e-waste sources, their environmental behavior, and their public and ecological health risks, and identify environmentally friendly materials to replace those materials producing hazardous substances; (2) prevent electronic products from turning into electronic pollution by following an intermediate steps: enhance the recycling rate and its management mechanism, improve the life of electronic products, raise people's awareness of sustainability through education, and reduce the generation of electronic pollution; (3) develop a series of pollution treatment mechanisms after the generation of e-waste, such as effective e-waste disposal methods, ecologically responsible management, and routine monitoringv ( 13 , 41 – 43 ). Several methods have been built to manage e-waste, including life cycle assessment (LCA), material flow analysis (MFA), multi-criteria analysis (MCA), and extended producer responsibility (EPR).…”

“…Due to the increase in the disposal of end-of-life (EoL) electrical and electronic goods, electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) contribute as one of the major pollution-causing products. Without proper management, the presence of heavy metals such as Hg, Cd, Pb, Co, Ni, Ti, Ag, Hg, Cd, As, and brominated flame retardants (BFRs), as well as other potentially dangerous compounds in e-waste, poses a threat to both the environment and human health ( 1 – 13 ).…”

Assessing circular economy in Brazilian industries through the analytical hierarchy process

“…The descriptors used were: (ALL ("circular economy" ) AND ( "Measurement" ) AND ( "Sustainable Development" ) AND ( "Analytical Hierarchy Process" ) ) AND ( ( ( circular AND economy ) ) AND ( measurement ) ) AND ( sustainable ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2022 ) OR LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2021 ) OR LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2020 ) OR LIMIT-TO ( PUB-YEAR , 2019 ) OR LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2018 ) ) AND ( LIM-IT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "ar" ) ). The state-of-the-art review revealed 148 possible articles, 28 of which were good matches for the subject and were used for the CE discussions since they addressed some of the CE steps, such as, for example, reduce, reuse, and recycle (Kumar et al, 2021;, or focused on energy and carbon emissions (Mishra et al, 2021); solar energy (Erol et al, 2021), biomass (Facchini et al, 2021), and e-waste (Alblooshi et al, 2022). However, most of these publications refer to the need to identify barriers to CE implementation (Kumar et al, 2021;Ullah et al, 2021;Irfan et al, 2022).…”

A Fuzzy Simultaneous Evaluation of Criteria and Alternatives (F-SECA) for Sustainable E-Waste Scenario Management

“…In these steps, the information about each decision-maker's opinion on the importance of the criteria and performance of the alternatives was collected. Using the scores assigned by the experts to each criterion and the SMART method, the subjective weights of the criteria were determined based on Equation (6). The scores and subjective weights are presented in Table 3.…”

“…The rise in sales of e-products makes the management of e-wastes more challenging for societies and governments [6]. Many industrialized and developed countries have established their e-waste management systems, but less industrialized and developing countries have several issues due to lack of proper waste management infrastructure [7].…”