Design of Reverse Logistics Network for Waste Batteries with an Application in Turkey

Abstract

The demand for portable electronic devices grows everyday and the batteries that power them pose important environmental problems. Batteries contain heavy metals such as; lead, mercury, cadmium that can contaminate the environment when batteries are disposed of improperly. The question is “How to manage this large amount of waste batteries?” In order to minimize the negative impacts of batteries on the environment, legislations have been published in the last two decades. In Turkey, the Regulation on Control of Waste Batteries and Accumulators APAK is published in 2004 and the project ‘Development of Waste Battery Disposal and Recycling Technologies’ is in progress. Within the scope of the project we do research on logistics of waste batteries. A multi period mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to design the reverse logistics network for waste batteries. We solved the model with the objective of minimizing the total present value of waste battery management system under a variety of scenarios in order to provide an effective decision support tool and offer useful outputs to decision-makers.