Prioritization of upcycling and recycling applications for the management of waste printed circuit boards by using S-LCA and MCDM

In this study, the upcycling and recycling applications for the management of waste printed circuit boards (PCBs) were compared through the sequential application of Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques. Upcycling applications were determined as gold, copper-tin alloy, lead, copper recovery and activated carbon production. And, portland cement, aggregate, sawdust, fiberglass and styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) productions were taken account as recycling applications. At the S-LCA stage, CML-IA baseline and ReCiPe 2016 methods were used for the characterization. For the MCDM study, environmental, technical and economic criteria were determined. Remarkable characterization results of S-LCA were used as the environmental criteria of MCDM. The Entropy method was used for the weighting of the criteria. TOPSIS method was used to compare the alternatives based on weighted criteria. S-LCA study shows that impact categories of Abiotic Depletion Potential (element basis), Total Ecotoxicity Potential and Human Toxicity Potential are the major impact categories. MCDM study shows that the gold recovery (0.9845) as an upcycling application and SBR production (0.7361) as a recycling application have been determined as the first applications to be applied to waste PCBs in terms of environmental, technical and economic aspects.