Abstract
Today’s continuous increasing production in the electronics industry has brought several challenges concerning waste management, emphasizing the need for sustainable solutions that support materials recovery. This issue emerges once electronics reach their end-of-life (EoL), becoming necessary to dispose or recover them. However, before disposal it is appropriate to analyze the composing materials. Indeed, electronics materials encompass a wide range of elements-such as metals, semiconductors, plastics, glass-and their recovery allows the extraction of valuable resources such as precious metals and allows waste reduction and energy savings. However, in many cases such considerations are only made at the EoL of the electronics and thus sometimes the recovery process becomes challenging as during the design stage, therefore at the beginning-of-life (BoL) of the electronics, are neglected strategies that can facilitate the materials recovery and recycling at the EoL. This paper wants to analyze design practices, focusing especially on design for recycling and design for disassembly, to enhance electronics’ materials recovery and recycling by providing a comprehensive review on recent applications considering publications of the last decade to assess the overall benefits of the latest implemented approaches.