A Reverse Supply Chain Model For Smartphone E-Waste Management in Bangladesh: Proposing A Closed-loop Framework

Abstract

Bangladesh has a lot of people who use phones over 180 million subscribers according to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission in 2024. On average people replace their handsets every 2-3 years. There is no system in place to collect, process or get value from old smartphones.

Existing research (Marufuzzaman et al., 2022) showed that the environmental laws in Bangladesh like the Environmental Conservation Act of 1995 the National Environmental Policy of 1992 and the Medical Waste Management Regulations of 2008 are not good enough for dealing with smartphones. These laws have been used informally for electronics. They do not work well. This paper looks at the problem from an angle as a supply chain management issue. It says that laws alone are not enough we need a system to collect take apart and recover value from phones.

This study is based on the idea of an economy that focuses on collecting old phone materials processing them and reusing them instead of throwing them away. We used concepts from closed-loop supply chain theory and the Extended Producer Responsibility model. We also used data from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission and other sources. We studied how old smartphones are being handled today. We found that if the amount of e-waste, from smartphones keeps growing it could create opportunities in Bangladesh.

We made a forecast model that uses data to predict how much e-waste from smartphones Bangladesh will have by 2030 and how material we can recover from these phones. We proposed a system for handling smartphones a reverse supply chain framework that supports a formal network for collecting and processing old phones. This framework is based on the idea of Extended Producer Responsibility and integrates with existing supply chains.

Our forecast shows that by 2030 Bangladesh could have between 12,700 and 73,400 tons of e-waste from smartphones every year. This e-waste contains a lot of materials like gold, copper and aluminum which can be put back into use instead of being thrown away. We can recover thousands of kilograms of gold and hundreds of tons of copper and aluminum. The paper concludes with a proposed preliminary data collection instrument for future empirical validation of the model.