Title: A spreadsheet-based decision support tool to assist small and medium-sized e-waste and lithium-ion battery recyclers for economic assessment

Authors: M. Kiran; S. Prasanna Venkatesan

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli – 620015, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: In many developing countries, including India, informal e-waste recyclers offer competitive prices as compared to formal recyclers. To manage this price competition, the small and medium-sized formal recyclers store the collected e-waste until the required volume is sourced for economical processing. Typically, the recyclers rely on their personal experience to decide the required volume for economical processing, albeit e-waste recycling is a relatively new business. The contributions of this research are: 1) to identify the factors that affect economic recycling of e-waste/lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) through literature and interactions with formal e-waste recyclers in India; 2) to develop and illustrate a simple, inexpensive, and easy to use open source decision support tool in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to assist the formal recyclers in the economic assessment of e-waste/LIBs to maximise profit. The developed tool consists of three modules: 1) user interface; 2) data storage worksheets; 3) optimiser.

Keywords: cost analysis; decision support systems; environmental management; mathematical programming; modelling; optimisation; lithium-ion batteries; LIBs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2025.149535

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2025 Vol.50 No.3, pp.294 - 311

Received: 04 Oct 2021
Accepted: 19 Jan 2022
Published online: 07 Nov 2025 *

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