Product take-back legislation and its impact on recycling and remanufacturing industries

Abstract

Take-back legislation holds producers financially responsible for handling and treating their products at end of life. A growing number of countries around the world have enacted such legislation, especially for electrical and electronic products. Clearly, such legislation impacts the strategic and operational decisions of companies operating in the affected industries and the operations management literature recently started to analyze these problems. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing take-back legislation and the papers that have studied various research questions associated with them. Our focus is particularly on papers that have studied the impact of these regulations on the recycling and remanufacturing industries.