  In recent years, recycling and disposal of end-of-life (EOL) electronic
products has attracted considerable attention in response to concerns over
resource recovery and environmental impacts of electronic waste (e-waste). In
many countries, legislation to make manufacturers responsible for taking
e-waste at the end of their useful lives either has been adopted or is being
considered. In this paper, by capturing different stages in the life-cycle of
EOL electronic products (or, e-waste) generated from private or small-entity
users, we develop two different formulations of a reverse logistics network,
i.e. system-optimum model and user-optimum model, to estimate both economic and
environmental effects of take-back legislation. In this system, e-waste is
collected through user drop-off at designated collection sites. While we study
the whole reverse logistics network associated with recycling and
remanufacturing of e-waste in the system-optimum model and obtain an optimum
solution from the policy maker's perspective, we split the logistics network
into two distinct parts in the user-optimum model in order to derive an optimum
solution from the users' standpoint. Implementing the proposed models on an
illustrative example shows how they are capable of estimating the economic and
environmental impacts of take-back legislation in various stages of e-waste's
life-cycle.
