Mixed policies for recovery and disposal of multiple type assembly products : commercial exploitation of compulsory return flows

New government policies aim at the closure of material flows as part of Integrated Chain Management (ICM). One of the main implementation instruments is extended producer responsibility, which makes Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) formally responsible for take-back, recovery and reuse of discarded products. One of the key problems for OEMs is to determine to what extent return products must be disassembled and which Recovery and Disposal (RD-) options should be applied. On a tactical management level, this involves anticipation to problems like meeting legislation, limited volumes of secondary end markets, bad quality of return products and facility investments in recycling infrastructure. In this paper a model is described that can be used to find such a Recovery and Disposal Policy for multiple product types. The objective function incorporates technical, ecological and commercial decision criteria and optimisation occurs using a rwo-level optimisation procedure. First, a set of potential Product Recovery and Disposal Strategies is generated for each separate product type. Secondly, optimal PRD-strategies are assigned to the products within the context of a coherent product group. The aim is to find an optimal balance berween maximising net profit and meeting constraints like recovery targets, limited market volumes and processing capacities, A TV-case is worked out to illustrate the working of the model.