Study for a method to assess the ease of disassembly of electrical and electronic equipment : method development and application to a flat panel display case study

Executive summary This report has been developed within the project "Technical support for Environmental Footprinting, material efficiency in product policy and the European Platform on LCA" (2013-2016) funded by the Directorate-General for Environment. It aims to develop a standardisable method using a verifiable metric to assess the reversible disassembly of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE). The main motivation behind this study was the need for a robust method to evaluate the ability to access or remove certain components from products to facilitate their repair, reuse or recycling. Such a method would serve different purposes, such as product design optimisation, policy compliance and improved end-of-life treatment. It is particularly relevant to the 2015 Circular Economy action plan, in which the European Commission is committed to "promote reparability, upgradability, durability and recyclability of products" through the Ecodesign Directive, and to address the request made of European standardisation organisations in 2015 to develop standards on the material efficiency of energy-related products, which is key to the action plan. The report gives the scientific background through a review of current methods available in the literature. These are grouped into: 1) methods to categorise manual operations and disassembly actions, and 2) methods to calculate the ease of disassembly of products. Based on the literature review, the proposed method focuses on identifying relevant product parameters and disassembly actions to be used for the calculation of a disassembly index. In particular, the authors identified six basic and relevant disassembly tasks of an average disassembly process: 1) Tool change, 2) Identifying connectors, 3) Manipulation of the product, 4) Positioning, 5) Disconnection and 6) Removal. For each disassembly tasks, and for each type of fastener, a table of reference values was determined.