ABSTRACT
In recent years, end-of-life disassembly has gained popularity because of both economic incentives and growing environmental concerns. Industrial ecology represents a firmly established systematic and integrated philosophy for dealing with the environmental aspects of the economy. The goal of industrial ecology is to promote sustainable development and affect a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking concerning the relationship between industry and ecology by efficient use of resources and by closing the loop of materials and energy flows in an effort to reduce their impact on the environment (Den Hond, 2000). Section 2.2 discusses the principal concepts of this method, with an emphasis on the materials life cycle, which is represented with the product-process chain. Section 2.3 focuses on the discussion of the different phases in the product-process chain of complex products. Section 2.4 places the waste from discarded complex products in the framework of the complete waste stream. Finally, section 2.5 deals with breakdown analyses of various complex products. Some concluding remarks are given in section 2.6.
