| dc.description.abstract | With the rapid development of technology, dry cell batteries are commonly used products found in every electrical and electronic products which are imported in an increasingly fashion. If not handled properly, these batteries pose a serious threat to humanity as they contain harmful substances that can pollute our environment. In recent years, government regulations has included the recycling of spent dry cells to make the public aware of the detrimental effects of unintelligent battery disposal. How to exceed to the objective of EU in recovering the wastes batteries and how large their capacities for treatment in a cost-effective manner are the crucial issues here.
Environmental protection has been known and extensively studied nowadays. Each and every waste must be explored for possible recycling. In this case, there is a need of developing a reverse logistics network for these spent batteries. This thesis focuses on Taiwan’s issue of waste batteries reverse logistic network. Considering the transportation and processing costs, and capacity limit, this study uses a mixed integer programming model to solve the problem. Results of this study show that Taiwan’s existing processing plants has the capacity to deal with the spent dry cells. Except for special kind of batteries, the processing plants no longer need to transport these dry cells abroad for treatment. Also, the impact of batch processing to the profit is logarithmic, thus a minimum lot size must be set up. In terms of government subsidy rates, this research has determined the break-even subsidized rate. Furthermore, this study can also be conducted to other types of processing such as hierarchical network architecture.
Keywords: Spent dry cell batteries, Reverse logistics, Green supply chain, Sustainable development
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