A three-stage methodology for initiating an effective management system for electronic waste in Turkey

•This study aims encouraging academicians to propose effective approaches for e-waste management and imposing city planners/managers to build integrated systems for different types of e-wastes.•Istanbul stands for a promising mobile phone market. Because of the high population in a very limited area, we attempt to solve the e-waste management problem in Istanbul.•The proposed methodology contains three stages to determine the exact collection nodes for an effective e-waste campaign. With this effort, we define the mobile phone collection nodes with a real life study based on selection of the superior shopping malls over a large number of possible locations.•This study contributes to literature as proposing a three stage methodology for selection problems which have numerous factors and alternatives.

Due to both consumption and obsolescence rates of new technology and shorter life cycles of electronic products, the volume of electronic waste (e-waste) is significantly increasing. While managing a great amount of e-waste, government institutions face compelling problems because of the economic and environmental concerns. This study uses a three-stage methodology to initiate the e-waste management activities in context of a collection campaign in Istanbul, explaining the potential benefits and underlying reasons. The problem includes selecting a superior set among a large but finite number of alternatives. Since it is hard to utilize advanced compensatory methods to solve these problems, a three-stage methodology is proposed for systematically reducing the number of alternatives. In this study, we employ the methodology to determine the locations of collection nodes in Istanbul. The main reason that we select Istanbul, is the requirement of an urgent intervention to deal with the large quantities of e-wastes. The result of this study will strongly assist the authorities to configure well-structured strategies for future e-waste management system.

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