Title: Recovering lead, plastic, and sulphuric acid from automobile used batteries by mathematical reverse logistics network modelling

Authors: Najme Roghani Langarudi; Abdolhossein Sadrnia; Amirreza Payandeh Sani

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology-Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, 0098, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Quchan University of Technology, P.O. Box: 94771-67335, Quchan, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Islamic Azad University of Semnan Branch, UAE

Abstract: Lead is one of the important heavy metals and its accumulation in environment results in destructive effects. Among the lead-based products, automobile battery has special importance owing to the growth of automobile manufacturing industry. In the past decade, reverse logistics as the main infrastructure for the collection and recycling of products at the end of its life cycle, has been the interest of green industry administrators. This study was conducted to design a reverse logistics network to recycle automobile used batteries and their contents like lead, scrap plastic, and sulphuric acid. This logistic network is a five layers frame work that consists of collection, remanufacturing, repair, recycling, and disposal of used batteries with two objective functions (cost and CO₂ emissions minimisation), modelled using mixed-integer linear programming. In order to show the practicability of the presented model, numerical example using general algebraic modelling system (GAMS) software was applied.

Keywords: reverse logistics; industrial ecology; automobile battery recycling; recovering battery; closed-loop supply chain; CO₂ emissions.

DOI: 10.1504/PIE.2019.098786

Progress in Industrial Ecology, An International Journal, 2019 Vol.13 No.1, pp.63 - 83

Received: 03 Jul 2017
Accepted: 18 Apr 2018
Published online: 02 Apr 2019 *

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