Sustainability assessment of dismantling strategies for end-of-life aircraft recycling

With the current increase of environmental concerns, conventional methods practiced at end-of-life would not be capable to sustain the growing amount of retired aircrafts waiting for final disposal in the scrap yards each year. Material recycling is known as an important environmentally friendly activity. The quality of recycled material in a recycling process is actively influenced by an appropriate disassembly/dismantling strategy. In recycling the carcass of the aircraft, it is suitable to separate and classify different aluminum grades into their main alloys family before sending them to recycling center (i.e. 2xxx and 7xxx). However, due to complexity in the aircraft structure, fully disassembly/dismantling or fully shredding the aircraft is not economically or environmentally viable, respectively. For this reason, this work discusses eight different disassembly/dismantling strategies that have been done on a real Bombardier Regional Jet aircraft. The study narrows the gap in sustainability evaluation of these strategies by using an efficient fuzzy assessment method. Ten different risk scenarios were considered to have a robust understanding about the sustainability performance of each strategy. The methodology used in this work allowed to select the best strategy in terms of sustainable disassembly/dismantling.