BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

In the last two decades, an increasing environmental awareness has strongly influenced the relationship between production-consumption of products, environment protection and sustainability. Based on the diffusion of green management approaches, great attention was paid by producers to the environmental consequences of production processes as well as waste prevention, recycling, reuse and minimization of final disposal of end-of-life products. By providing products and services able to reduce their environmental impact, manufacturers discovered further opportunities for strengthening their competitive advantage according to the circular economy (CE) approaches. CE is considered as a new business model able to support a more sustainable development by retaining, as much possible, products, resources, energy and materials. This could be achieved by reusing, refurbishing, remanufacturing and recycling products, materials and waste.

Specifically, several studies show that optimized waste management processes could represent a relevant way to achieve economic, environmental and social benefits expected by the adoption of CE approaches. In fact, the diffusion of the processes of recycling and reuse of end-of-life products, supported by specific government's regulations, has generated new economic markets and new entrepreneurial activities that are growing in many developed and developing countries.

In such a context, the Reverse logistic processes of collection, recycling and reuse of Waste of Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE or e-waste) plays a critical role for different reasons. Firstly, WEEE is one of the fastest growing streams of waste in the world with the highest growth rate per year (3–5%). In fact, while in 2016 about 45 million tons of e-waste were generated globally (6.1 Kg per capita or Kgpc), it will achieve about 52.2 million tons in 2021 (6.8 Kgpc). The increase of e-waste is strongly fueled by the growing Electronic and Electrical Equipment (EEE) market demand which has in 2016 resulted in a 2.9% increase in the millions of tons of EEE put on the market.

Secondly, within e-wastes, there are different critical, valuable and hazardous substances which requires specific recycling processes and practices in order to avoid both environmental and health problems. Thirdly, the recycling and the recovery of the e-waste represents an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact. Furthermore, as a large quantity of precious and special metals are in WEEEs, their recovery represents a relevant economic opportunity as it allows for saving scarce and expensive resources necessary for the production of EEE itself and other devices. The economic convenience deriving from the reuse of materials embedded into e-wastes is indicated nowadays as one of the most important sustainability challenges able to ensure the development of the proper CE approaches.

Accordingly, the European Union (EU) have issued regulations, policies and actions to deal with the post-consumption phase of such EEEs. Despite the great efforts made, the collection of e-waste is very limited (after 10 years, the volume of WEEE collected in the period 2010–2016 is about 40% of EEE put on market) and is highly unbalanced across EU Member States (the WEEE collection rate per capita ranges from 1.6 kg in Romania to 16.5 kg in Sweden). Moreover, the more recent EU directives (2012/19/EU) has increased the collection target, thus enlarging the unbalances among different European countries. At the same time, the WEEEs that are treated coherently with the EU regulations (and then recycled and reused) are about the 90% of the WEEE collected. This data highlights that the collection system represents a critical element of the WEEE management system and in particular of the WEEE reverse logistic system. Moreover, the collection centers (CCs) represent a key element of the WEEE management system as a whole, being the initial point of the reverse logistic cycle. Its efficiency and effectiveness have a strong impact on all the performance of the WEEE management system and on the CE perspective that the EU intends to pursue. Moreover, WEEE collection plays an important role since it has a large effect on the actual recovery of critical raw materials (CRMs). For this reason, the European Commission individuates the increase of the collection centers as one out of four main activities to put in place the infrastructure needed and to improve the efficiency of the WEEE management system according to a CE perspective.

Therefore, within the context of the EU policy, the objective of this work is to evaluate the extent to which the Italian WEEE collection system is able to support the achievement of the collection targets with a specific focus on the provincial level. Since Italian reality is characterized by the existence of well-known strong territorial socio-economic differences, we expect that this could be reflected in the WEEE collection system organization. Such an analysis is necessary in order to grasp the specific strengthens and weaknesses at province-specific level in order to support the decision-makers about the more effective customized measures to be adopted (e.g., hard measures, such as investments in collection infrastructures soft measures such as initiatives having an impact on citizen behaviors) to improve the collection performance.

In this view, although there are some studies on the Italian WEEE collection system, they explore different aspects and adopt different levels of analysis. However, no research specifically evaluates the effectiveness of the current management of the WEEE collection process at the provincial level. In this view, the paper adopts the transition probability matrix method that is novel for e-waste analysis being adopted to analyze municipal separate wastes. The capillarity of a data analysis at the provincial level on the collection of the WEEE provides both a substantial internal homogeneity and the possibility of effectively interpreting the deviations and the heterogeneity of the data limiting the influences of the territorial and demographic dimension.

Based on these premises, a descriptive data analysis, the paper aims to evaluate the extent to which the current Italian organization of the WEEE collection system is able to support the achievement of the targets defined for the e-waste collection by European and Italian authorities with a specific focus on the role played by the CCs. In particular, this study aims to verify the presence of territorial divide about the WEEE collection performance, the correlation between collection performance and the presence of CCs, and the impact of external events on the trends of the collection results. Our analysis focuses both on the amount of WEEE collected and on the infrastructure represented by the distribution of CCs in the 110 Italian provinces (NUTS-3). In this view, we use data provided by the national clearing house "CdCRAEE" about e-waste collection and CC system for the period 2008–2017.