Market Value of Recycled Material Mixes: A Key Parameter for Designing for Recycling

Research on Design for Recycling has long focused on disassembly sequence planning and ease-of-disassembly evaluation. Recently, a few studies have begun considering the material separation processes that characterize bulk recycling downstream in the recovery chain. However, the boundary conditions of bulk recycling are outside the scope of the above-mentioned investigations and therefore important economic parameters, such as process costs and the market value of recycled materials, are arbitrarily defined. This study presents a method for determining the revenue for different mixes of recycled metals in order to analyze how the value of the remaining mixed material changes when a part is disassembled or a separation process is carried out.