Jef R. Peeters

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Mechanical Engineering

Repair practices are driven not only by consumers’ internal motivation, but also by external infrastructural, social including cultural, financial, and political factors. We explore these factors with the goal of understanding the public repair of electrical and electronic products (e‐products) from a systems perspective to help devise appropriate...

We present the results of the regression contest organized for the LIBS 2022 conference. While the motivation and design of the contest are briefly presented, the work focuses on the methodologies of the three best-performing teams. The employed spectral preprocessing strategies, choice of regression models and its optimization are detailed for eac...

Previous research has demonstrated the economic and environmental benefits of demanufacturing over complete product shredding prior to material separation and the importance of demanufacturing for rework, reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling in the transition towards a more circular economy. Additionally, some products do not allow for the us...

The European Green Deal has the ambition to enhance recycling practices to better close material loops. However, in the recycling industry of today it is common practice to shred products to liberate the different materials that the product contains. This, typically results in a broad range of object sizes and mixed waste streams, which increases t...

Recent developments in robotic demanufacturing raise the potential to increase the cost-efficiency of recycling and recovering resources from Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). However, the industrial adoption of robotic demanufacturing for mixed WEEE streams requires tailored instructions for every product model. Considering the...

Integrating multi-sensor systems to sort and monitor complex waste streams is one of the most recent innovations in the recycling industry. The complementary strengths of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and computer vision systems offer a novel multi-sensor solution for the complex task of sorting aluminum (Al) post-consumer scrap into...

The rapid increase in waste generation from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has created the need for more advanced sensor-based systems to sort this complex type of waste. Therefore, this study proposes a method for object detection, instance segmentation, and mass estimation of plastics and contaminants using the fusion of RGB and depth...

In the recycling industry, the use of deep spectral convolutional networks for the purpose of material classification and composition estimation is still limited, despite the great opportunities of these techniques. In this study, the use of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) for the three-way...

Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is a prominent and increasing waste stream for which the Commission of the European Union has put in place ambitious recycling targets. However, these targets can only be achieved by ensuring that both industry and governments develop adequate infrastructure and policies for recycling plastics in an ec...

While deep learning has helped improve the performance of classification, object detection, and segmentation in recycling, its potential for mass prediction has not yet been explored. Therefore, this study proposes a system for mass prediction with and without feature extraction and selection, including principal component analysis (PCA). These fea...

In this study, a procedure to automatically identify the product model by evaluating an image of the label is presented. First, object character recognition (OCR) extracts text from the product label. Second, to identify the product model, the extracted text is compared with unique model references in a database, giving access to other model‐specif...

Recycling of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is challenging due to the high variety in both the design and composition of the products in this waste stream. Therefore, targeted demanufacturing and appropriate material sorting processes are crucial, but remain often a manual and thus labor-intensive and costly activity. Despite firs...

The expected surge in demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has influenced the supply chain of several raw materials and increased their market prices significantly. In recent years, rechargeable battery development projects have started addressing the topic of resource availability and their prices. As a result, metrics for assessing resource cr...

Due to the rapid increase in sales of mobile electronic devices, the number of batteries ending up in waste electric and electronic equipment (WEEE) is also rapidly increasing. According to the EU legislation, all batteries need to be removed from WEEE, which is currently done manually for tablets, posing potential safety risks for workers and resu...

Due to shifting material use in several sectors, such as the automotive sector, the demand for wrought aluminium alloys is significantly increasing. Because of their low weight and desirable mechanical properties, wrought aluminium alloys find their use in many different applications. However, the primary production of aluminium is extremely energy...

The aluminium Twitch fraction of a Belgian recycling facility could be further sorted by implementing Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS). To achieve this goal, the presented research identifies commercially interesting output fractions and investigates machine learning methods to classify the post-consumer aluminium scrap samples based on...

Today, the sorting of battery packs and pouch cells from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is performed manually as the batteries vary in shape and weight. Therefore, the feasibility to classify waste batteries by first recognizing text on an image of the battery with deep learning object character recognition (OCR), and then compari...

The probable emergence of a global aluminium scrap surplus in the coming decade is one of the main incentives for the aluminium recycling industry to invest in new methods and technologies to collect, sort and recycle aluminium scrap. However, due to the considerable uncertainty in the evolution of the global scrap surplus, it is difficult for poli...

The Circular Economy Action Plan, in the context of the European Green deal, introduces new policies which promote a more sustainable use of plastics. These policies also prioritize the optimization of plastics recycling processes by increasing both the amount and quality of plastic recyclates produced, which is to a large extend defined by the pur...

Integrating multi-sensor systems to sort and monitor complex waste streams is one of the most recent innovations in the recycling industry. The complementary strengths of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and computer vision systems offer a novel multi-sensor solution for the complex task of sorting aluminum (Al) post-consumer scrap into...

One of the most promising innovation strategies for sorting and recycling post-consumer aluminium scrap is using quantitative Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) analysis. However, existing methods to estimate alloying element concentrations based on LIBS spectra, such as linear univariate regression and Machine Learning models, are still t...

In this article, a six-step approach is proposed to simulate the grasp and evaluate the grasp quality for a versatile vacuum gripper by tracking the deformation and force-torque wrench of the gripping pad. Over 100 K synthetic grasps are generated for neural network training. Furthermore, a gripping attention convolutional neural network (GA-CNN) i...

Robotic grasping is still challenging due to limitations in perception and control, especially when the CAD models of objects are unknown. Although some grasp planning approaches using computer vision have been proposed, these methods can be seen as open-loop grasp planning methods and are often not robust enough. In this paper, a novel grasp plann...

In consequence of the electrification and the increased adoption of lightweight structures in the automotive industry, global demand for wrought Aluminum (Al) is expected to rise while demand for cast Al will stagnate. Since cast alloys can only be converted to wrought alloys by energy-intensive processes, the most promising strategy to avoid the e...

Achieving a more circular production and consumption pattern will require consumers to make proactive choices regarding practices such as repair and product life extension. However, galvanizing such choices and practices may not be left alone up to consumers because their behaviors are driven not only by internal factors (e.g., attitude and motivat...

The complex composition of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) plastics represents a challenge during post-consumption plastic recycling. A single WEEE category, e.g. large household appliances (LHA), can contain several different plastic types with overlapping material properties, making the sorting of individual plastics a challenge....

The European Union is promoting the uptake of low emission vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. However, this transition will increase the demand for five important battery raw materials; i.e. lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and graphite. Therefore, a substance flow analysis and forecasting model are proposed to investi...

The last decade witnessed an increasing global adoption of electric vehicles. Moreover, the nickel-cobalt-manganese battery chemistry has gained wide acceptance among manufacturers of electric vehicles in Europe. Nevertheless, the environmental impacts associated with recycling this battery technology have not been fully investigated. Therefore, a...

Increasing the durability of electrical and electronics products is key to reduce our worldwide material consumption and the related environmental footprint. A valuable strategy to achieve this goal is extending the useful lifetime of products by means of repair. Methods to assess and rate the repairability of products have been developed recently....

For many years, regulation and life cycle studies have focussed on reducing the environmental footprint of vehicles. Despite the implementation of different end-of-life vehicle (ELV) regulations to encourage material reuse and to increase recycling and recovery rates, it is unclear how these policies are progressing towards realising a circular eco...

The trend of increased use of lithium-ion batteries, challenges the cost-effectiveness and safety of manual battery separation during the end-of-life treatment of Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Therefore, the need for novel techniques to separate and sort batteries from WEEE is increasingly important. For this reason, the presented...

The ambition to extend material recycling from end-of-life electric and electronic products seems to lead to an unavoidable trade-off between circularity maximisation and quality concerns. However, optimized pre-treatment can help to assure that both polymer fraction compatibility and imperfect separation with the available technologies are fully t...

The quality of mechanically recycled plastics from WEEE is seen as one of the main bottlenecks for their re-application in high-quality products to enable a circular economy for these materials. Most literature focuses on the quality at the end of the value chain while significant potential to improve the performance of the entire value chain is se...

The closed-loop recycling of PolyCarbonate/Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate (PC/ASA) housings from post-consumer payment terminals that are subject to a take-back scheme is presented. The technical feasibility is evaluated by means of mechanical and rheological testing. Compared to virgin PC/ASA, a loss in impact strength is found to be the main bott...

Managing the waste stream of lithium ion batteries from electric vehicles is an emerging challenge. Therefore, a distribution delay forecasting model is developed considering multiple end-of-life options for battery applications; including replace, reuse, repurpose and recycle. This model is used to forecast the characteristics of the waste stream....

Because of the low concentrations of Tantalum on printed wiring boards, today it is not economically viable to recycle Tantalum in pyro- and hydrometallurgical processes. However, in case the Tantalum can be up concentrated, the recycling of the Tantalum can become economically viable in the multi-stage process used to refine Tantalum from ores. Th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent a consumer’s repair strategy impacts the annual costs of ownership of a washing machine and two types of vacuum cleaner. Design/methodology/approach The annual cost of ownership is determined by calculating the annual life cycle cost (LCC) for the respective devices. The annual LCC...

This two paper series describes a method to develop and evaluate innovative recycling strategies for WEEE plastics. Part A presents a SWOT analysis of a new dismantling based recycling process of plastic components and the integration in an existing post-shredder separation recycling facility. Subsequently, recycling strategies are developed and th...

The issue of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) and potential interruptions to their supply and availability due to concerns such as shortages, trade restrictions or geopolitical considerations are topics that are relatively unknown to the general public. Education and the dissemination of this information amongst the general public has been promoted as...

This two paper series describes a method to develop and evaluate new recycling strategies for WEEE plastics. Part A presents a SWOT analysis that leads to five recycling strategies for the optimal integration of new dismantling based recycling processes for plastic components in an established post-shredder separation infrastructure. In this paper...

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) comprises a complex mix of engineering plastic grades often containing flame retardants. Whereas post-shredder recycling strategies are widely implemented, considerably higher economic and environmental returns can be expected based on information-rich dismantling scenarios. This paper therefore pres...

Worldwide every year 41.8 billion tons of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) reaches the end-of-life with changing designs, product, and material compositions. In order to enable the recycling industry to adapt its processes to the evolutions in product design and material composition, it is crucial to assess these changes in waste streams....

Repairing modern electrical and electronic equipment is becoming increasingly difficult. The encountered challenges significantly contribute to the costs associated with repair, making direct replacement of a product often the most straightforward option for the consumer. Therefore, the Benelux Union has requested a study to investigate extending p...

The increasing demand for aluminium (Al) has led to the significant growth of secondary Al production. Although Al is one of the most recycled metal streams, the presence of impurities, such as iron, silicon and copper, has limited the environmental and economic benefits of recycling Al. These competing interests have led to the choice of recycling...

The European Union is setting increasingly challenging targets for the waste recycling rates of its member states. This makes improvements in recycling processes, such as dense medium metal separation, a necessity. Dense medium metal separation takes place in a dense medium drum separator where the light metal floats and can be easily separated fro...

The overall aim of this study is to evaluate and, if possible, quantify the ease of repair for energy-related products (ErPs) considering the economic impact from a consumer perspective. In order to meet this objective, repairability criteria for ErPs are proposed. The developed criteria are in accordance with the ongoing initiative of the CEN-CELE...

Predictive models to forecast the volume and material composition of end-of-life photovoltaic (PV) panels indicate that substantial material resources can potentially be recovered from silicon based PV panels in the next decades. The technical feasibility of selective mechanical delamination through milling and cleaving was experimentally studied....

The sustainable management of aluminium has become crucial due to the exponential growth in global demand. The transition to a sustainable society with lightweight electric vehicles has led to the increasing use of aluminium in the transportation sector. This has consequently led to the importance of aluminium recycling to prevent the valuable mate...

The present study further develops the eDIM method and database, in particular based on feedback received from stakeholders on the previous technical report. The study also aims to demonstrate the applicability of the method on some sample notebook computers. Similarly to the first report (Vanegas et al., 2016), this study aims to provide scientifi...

Over the last decade the environmental impact of photovoltaic (PV) panels has extensively been explored, often using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. However, the manufacturing data in reference databases are typically outdated and the end-of-life treatment is mostly omitted from the scope of these studies. The objective of the current st...

The increasing complexity of multi-material vehicle designs has created challenges for vehicle recycling. Many countries have implemented different end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) treatment policies and guidelines. For example, the European Commission has set recycling and recovery targets for end-of-life vehicle (ELV). This paper discusses a comparati...

Recycling of rare earth metals from permanent magnets used in hard disk drives (HDDs) is an intensively investigated scenario. However, the material composition of the waste stream of data storage devices will drastically change over the coming decades because of ongoing replacement of the HDD market by solid state drives (SSD) that do not contain...

The focus of the presented research is on the mechanical recycling of postconsumer plastics from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Currently only a limited number of these plastics are mechanically recycled on an industrial scale while the majority is thermally treated for energy recovery. Since there is a significant potential for...

Waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) constitutes one of the most relevant waste streams because of the quantity and presence of valuable materials. However, there is limited knowledge on the resource potential of urban mining WEEE, as data on material composition, and the efficiency of current recycling treatments are still scarce. I...

Circular economy strategies encourage, among others, concrete actions to extend the product lifetime. Product’s repair and reuse, and component harvesting for reuse, all require the facilitated access to product components. Consequently, a reduction of the disassembly time and the related costs will increase the economic feasibility of product life...

Forecasting emerging waste streams is challenging because of high uncertainty on the product lifetime and material composition, which should be taken into account to forecast the evolution in amount and composition of such waste streams. In addition, it is impossible to collect complete product lifetime data for emerging waste streams. For this rea...

In industrialized countries, waste electrical and electronic equipment is mostly processed in shredder-based processes, which are characterized by a low recovery of precious metals, rare earth elements and flame retardant plastics. To increase the recycling efficiency for these materials, a dismantling tool has been developed. The development proce...

Prior research has demonstrated that a disassembly based end-of-life (EoL) treatment for electronic products is characterized by the highest recovery rates for precious metals (PMs) and non-commodity plastics, such as flame retardant plastics. Nonetheless, EoL electronic products are nowadays also commonly recycled without disassembly in different...

In industrialized countries, waste electrical and electronic equipment is mostly processed in shredder-based processes, which are characterized by a low recovery of precious metals, rare earth elements and flame retardant plastics. To increase the recycling efficiency for these materials, a dismantling tool has been developed. The development proce...

Nearly 20% of the global emissions and energy consumption originate from material extraction. In the last decade recycling has emerged as an ecologically sound solution to face material scarcity and to lower the environmental impact caused by material extraction and refining. Mainly due to the high labour costs, in industrialized countries automate...

Prior research has demonstrated that design for disassembly enables higher recovery rates for precious and critical metals, as well as flame retardant plastics from End-of-Life (EoL) electronics. However, small EoL electronic products are nowadays commonly recycled in a size-reduction based treatment or can be directly treated in an integrated Prec...

Proving the effectiveness of an idea generation method is key to its acceptance in an industrial and academic environment. This necessitates the development of a set of widely accepted metrics covering the different aspects on which idea generation methods can be characterized. This paper gives an overview of the existing metrics, and demonstrates...

Because of the rapid succession of technological developments, the architecture and material composition of many products used in daily life have drastically changed over the last decades. As a result, well-adjusted recycling technologies need to be developed and installed to cope with these evolutions. This is essential to guarantee continued acce...

This paper presents a number of novel active fasteners developed to significantly lower disassembly costs during reconditioning, remanufacturing, and recycling of products. In the initial stage of the fastener development process, the applicability of distinct trigger signals for active disassembly (AD) is evaluated. Based on this evaluation, the h...

Increasing resource prices, ever-higher complexity of products, recent developments in legislation and the importance of a green brand image have resulted in an increased interest of original equipment manufacturers to facilitate a disassembly based end-of-life treatment for their products. The main reason is that precious metals, rare earth elemen...

Reversible fasteners suited for Active Disassembly (AD), which can be simultaneously released by an increase in ambient air pressure, have been developed in prior research. However, the implementation of these active fasteners in electronic consumer products is hampered as a result of the ongoing trend of miniaturization. Therefore, a second genera...

Cost efficient disassembly operations require the simultaneous release of multiple fasteners without the need to identify the location of every individual fastener. Despite the availability of a number of Active Disassembly concepts which offer significant potential to make systematic product disassembly economically viable, the stage of mass indus...

Due to high labor costs, e-waste recycling companies in industrialized countries increasingly adopt destructive mechanical pre-processing based treatments. These processes perform poorly for precious metals and plastics due to material incompatibility and increased entropy, resulting in low effective recycling efficiencies for these material catego...