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

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.