Three essays on the identification of innovative operation strategies for the sustainable recovery of automotive electronic wastes

The thesis contributes to the area of sustainable management of wasted automotive compo-nents with a twofold target: the first one deals with the quantification of potential profits coming from the recovery of materials from automotive electronic wastes. The second one deals with the identification of innovative operation strategies related to the sustainable re-covery of these elements and the measurement of their effect on current economic perfor-mances of the Italian End of Life Vehicle (ELV) recovery chain through a System Dynamics (SD) model. The management of obsolete cars has become a relevant issue during the last decades. Given the fast evolution of vehicles towards lighter, safer, more connected, electrified and auto-guided mobility concepts, automotive wastes have become even more difficult to manage for current actors involved in the official ELV recovery chain. Many regulations and directives were activated worldwide. However, current recovery technologies are still maintaining fea-tures and performances like in the sixties. This way, innovation trends representative of the automotive sector (e.g. construction logics, embedded components and materials) cannot be managed correctly by dismantlers and shredders. Lots of components and materials that could be either reused, remanufactured or recycled are still lost either in landfills or in inciner-ators. Trying to limit this enormous depletion of natural resources and make the actors in-volved in the ELV recovery chain aware of these issues, the current thesis wants to identify innovative operation strategies related to the sustainable recovery of automotive electronic equipments, one of the most valuable elements embedded in modern cars.