Disassembly efficiency improvements with active disassembly technologies

Disassembly is an advantageous end-of-life activity that can promote reuse, remanufacture, and purer recycling of a product's subassemblies and components. The benefit of disassembly for small electronic products, such as modems, routers, and electric adaptors, has, however, outweighed by the processing costs because current disassembly methods require one-at-a-time processing. This limits disassembly for these products and thus limits the recovery of valuable materials and components from these products at end-of-life. Active disassembly (AD) has been a means to overcome this disadvantage by incorporating innovative fasteners and elements that can react with an outside stimulus to cause self disassembly of a product. This in turn will allow for batch or mass processing of products for disassembly. This paper will focus on the benefits and efficiency gains in disassembly when products are fitted with AD fasteners. Seven electronic products that would normally not be disassembled at end-of-life are analyzed and their theoretical gains with AD are discussed.