9727248 Knight Increasing environmental concerns and impending legislation, particularly concerning product takeback, emphasize the importance of the end-of-life management of products. This has resulted in efforts to recover value from components and materials before discarding of such products and to reduce environmental impact. Among the various ways in which value can be recovered are, disassembly or de-manufacturing, bulk recycling, and incineration for energy generation. Materials only have significant recycled value when they are divided into clean separate types. This means that the viable recycling of manufactured products depends greatly on the efficiency with which materials can be separated from each other. The separation and recovery of items and materials from products for recycling can be approached in two main ways, which can be used together. These are relatively careful disassembly and bulk recycling, which often involves the shredding of mixes of materials and using various separation techniques on the stream of particles produced. In the long term, recycling can be made more effective by the design of products for greater ease of disassembly and recycling. This requires the development of suitable product analysis tools to enable design teams to evaluate the ease of disassembly and recycling of alternative product concepts during the early stages of design. In addition, the development of better methods of bulk recycling and for increasing the efficiency of existing bulk recycling processes is important. The work to be carried out in this proposal addresses both of these aspects. The proposers have previously been involved in the following developments: Product analysis tools which simulate end-of-life disassembly and evaluate the financial and environmental effects of different product designs and end-of-life scenarios. Modeling of bulk recycling processes, in particular to evaluate the best processing sequences for material separation processes. Building on this previous work, this proposal is concerned with the investigation of several cases of the problem of selecting the best sequence for recovery of materials by bulk recycling, including the matching of mixes of different products. The use of this information in analyzing the best combination of disassembly and bulk recycling for recovered value or environmental impact will be also investigated. Based on this investigation, tools for helping designers examine the consequences of material selection upon the end of life recovery of materials will be constructed, to enable design teams to evaluate the recycling potential of proposed products through optimal combinations of disassembly and efficient bulk recycling. In addition, models of material separation processes for bulk recycling will assist bulk recycling facilities to operate in an economic manner, enhancing the end-of-life recovery of materials that would otherwise not be recovered and be consigned to landfills. ***
