In order to secure valuable materials and to establish better circular economy practice, new legislation to promote recycling of small-sized e-waste including used mobile phones started in April 2013, in Japan. In order to consider appropriate methods to reduce material usage in mobile phone production, an examination of appropriate strategies in handling used mobile phone products is warranted. This paper investigates an analysis of material flow model for used mobile phones. Then, by analyzing the model, it tries to find suitable strategies to reduce the material consumption associated with mobile phone production and consumption. Although material recycling is an important strategy in Japan, other waste management options exist. This research indicates which factors are keys in reducing material consumption and CO₂ emission, and establishing resource efficient production. The study concludes that “domestic product reuse” and “official recycling networks” are equally good in reducing the consumption of virgin materials associated with mobile phone production. However, in doing so, it is necessary to establish a system in which consumers can properly return their used mobile phones for recycling. Such an end-of-life waste management system can reduce both waste and resource consumption and the environmental impacts associated with increasing mobile phone production. Further research investigating the value of increasing the product reuse rate and the collection return rate for mobile phones is also warranted.

The emerging operating mode of new automobile forces in the context of China brings up new problems for the development of the EV CLSC, which are the market position shift inside the loop and government policy and consumer awareness of changes outside it. Aiming at promoting the development of the EV CLSC, this study integrates the influence of internal and external factors, analyzes their joint impact on the performance of the EV CLSC, and explores the optimal CLSC structure. Specifically, this study develops five game theory models considering different CLSC structures and consumers’ green awareness under government subsidy and varied channel leaderships. Combining theoretical analysis with numerical simulation, the study reveals the performance of the EV CLSC and indicates the optimal CLSC decisions for different players. The result suggests that an EV manufacturer should develop an EV CLSC by itself considering the elimination of double marginalization. When a third-party player is incorporated, the EV manufacturer should undertake the collection effort by itself to optimize the benefit for both the EV manufacturer and the third-party player, especially considering the increasing green awareness of consumers. And a lift of each player’s channel power would always be a wise choice for each other. For the government which has the goals of promoting both the EV industry and the end-of-life treatment of obsolete EVs, a series of trade-offs including the CLSC structure and channel leadership should be considered prudently. This study contributes to the comprehensive understanding of the optimal decisions of the EV CLSC, and will benefit the development of the EV CLSC.

This study focuses on disassembly and separation processes of recycling of used electronic products. In the previous study, the authors have proposed a concept of remote recycling. The concept can replace manual disassembly and reduce the recycling cost, by carrying out the operation from where labor is relatively inexpensive and sufficient. As a typical electronic product, the paper takes mobile phone as an example and evaluates characteristics in separating valuable metals from used products to examine the feasibility of the concept. It is said that most of the valuable metals of the used electronics are contained in Printed Circuit Board (PCB). Experiment results showed that metals such as Fe, Cu, Al, Cr, Ni and Mg were much more concentrated in roughly crushed and visually separated particles than in manually disassembled PCB. Thus, the paper concluded that visual separation of valuable metals is possible, and this result will be a first step towards implementation of remote recycling.

Environmental consciousness has gained increasing interest in recent years, and product life cycle design that aims to maximize total value while minimizing environmental load and costs should be implemented. To achieve that, the processes of idea generation and decision-making for eco-business strategies, as well as the design of a target product and its life cycle options, should be systematically supported. This paper proposes a strategic decision-making method for eco-business planning so that a designer can easily find a set of eco-business ideas that effectively improve environmental and economic performance simultaneously. A decision-making procedure based on this method is also illustrated with a simplified example of a laptop computer business.