Environmental integrated production and recycling management

Environmental integrated production and recycling planning is of great importance for the competitive position of production enterprises. Due to increasing disposal costs for industrial byproducts and waste as well as stronger emission standards, companies will be required to set up and control advanced, environmental friendly production technologies, so that emissions and byproducts will be reduced drastically. Nonavoidable byproducts and used products at the end of their lifetime have to be recycled by the producers. The complexity of the resulting decision problems requires adequate operations research methods. The following paper deals with the development of sophisticated operations research models for two selected planning problems: recycling of industrial byproducts and dismantling and recycling of products at the end of their lifetime. The models have been applied successfully to large industrial problems in practice in the fields of recycling of demolition waste in a German–French region and byproduct management in the steel industry. The presentations of these two applications follow a case study point of view.