Estimation of prospective recycling costs of industrial products with the help of fuzzy linear programming

Following the new German recycling and waste management act, producers are responsible for their products during the whole life-cycle. They have to take back and re-cycle their products at the end of their service life. Therefore, the resulting redistribution, dismantling and recycling costs have to be included into the life-cycle costs. Due to long service lives of most industrial products, the available dismantling and recycling techniques and capacities in future, as well as the resulting costs, are difficult to determine. In this paper, a Fuzzy Linear Programming model for the minimization of dismantling and recycling costs at the end of the lifetime of industrial products is developed. With the help of the present approach, companies will be enabled to estimate and integrate future recycling costs into the life-cycle costs and to influence the development stage of their products.