Determining the most suitable upcycli̇ng and recycling strategies for management of electronic waste

The electronic wastes that arise with the increase in the production of electronic goods need to be managed correctly. With the different recycling and upcycling methods to be applied to these wastes, both curative intermediate products for processes and higher quality valuable products can be obtained. It can be difficult to determine in advance which of the many recycling and upcycling alternatives will be the most environmentally, technically and economically viable. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and multi-criteria decision making techniques (MCDM) are very useful methods to determine this. In this thesis study, which was prepared from this point of view, up-cycling and recycling strategies applied/can be applied to waste printed circuit boards were determined, and LCA study of the products to be produced as a result of these strategies. The results obtained from the LCA study established the environmental criteria values for use in MCDM. For the MCDM study, in addition to the environmental criteria, technical and economic criteria were also determined and weighted by the Entropy method. The results obtained from the weighting method were evaluated using the TOPSIS method. It resulted in closeness to the ideal solution of 0.9757 for the production of "Bronze Nanoparticle" from the upcycling strategies and 0.7743 for the production of "Portland Cement" from the recycling strategies. These findings have led to scientifically important results by considering the Simplified Life Cycle Assessment and the MCDM method together.