Service Outsourcing in Recycling of Used Small Electronics

It is said that PCB (printed circuit board) of used electronics contains considerable amount of critical metals, rare earths, and so on. However, one of the problems in utilizing such used products is that the valuable materials scatter among huge numbers of small-sized electronics. Efficient methods of collection and concentration are necessary. Although manual disassembly and separation of PCB is a good way to enhance the quality of the recycled materials, it causes a large labor cost. As a solution to this problem, this paper focuses on a new concept of recycling process which is to outsource such manual operation to unspecified workers via internet. The concept will be also helpful to reduce environmental impact caused by unnecessary transportation of the used products. This paper has proposed the concept of the outsourcing of recycling operations and discussed the advantages of the concept. And then, it tried to prototype a mechanism to enable the idea. The paper carried out a basic design of screening and sorting mechanisms and made some experiments of operation. The basic results obtained in this paper clarified that the remote recycling concept is feasible and promising.