Ecocredit system for incentivizing the recycling of waste electric and electronic equipment based on a thermodynamic approach

The use of electric and electronic equipment is increasing dramatically in the last years and entails an important amount of waste containing many valuable metals. The impact of not recovering such valuable elements is that new raw materials need to be extracted from the crust. Hence, the demand for primary resources is increasing exponentially and the depletion of mines is putting at risk the very development of green and efficient technologies which heavily rely on such materials. Consequently, it becomes very important that WEEEs (waste electric and electronic equipment) become appropriately recycled. In this paper a thermodynamic assessment related to the material composition from different devices has been carried out to provide a physical value for each device. This has been done through an indicator called thermodynamic rarity, which rates minerals according to their scarcity in the crust and the energy required to mine and refine them. The scarcer the mineral and the more energy intensive the process to extract and refine a mineral, the greater the thermodynamic rarity of the raw material. Based on this, an expression has been developed to value WEEE that are sent to an appropriate recycling plant through the so-called ecocredits. This expression is based on the raw material content of the given device, assessed through the thermodynamic rarity indicator, the state of the device (i.e. if it is suitable for reuse) and the lifetime (to avoid encouraging the throw-away culture). Ecocredits are then granted to users at the moment when they dispose of appropriately the WEEEs through a mobile phone application. The ecocredits can then be exchanged in the form of different incentive schemes.