Track: Engineering Management

Abstract

Electronic waste (E-waste) generation is increasing throughout the world with the flourishing dependence on electronic goods in a digitalized world, thus creating an adverse impact on social and environmental sustainability. Managing such a huge amount of waste from electronic products is an emerging challenge to the global community, especially in a densely populated developing country like Bangladesh. Research on exploring the drivers of e-waste management in Bangladesh can greatly help developing countries overcome this challenge. Several studies have been conducted to discover the drivers and challenges of managing e-waste. However, in the context of developing countries, none of the earlier studies have presented the ranking of the drivers based on their prominence and explored the causal relationships among them. Therefore, this study applies the fuzzy decision-making trial, and evaluation laboratory (F-DEMATEL) method to find the prominence and examine the cause-effect relations among the drivers of e-waste management in a developing country. Fourteen drivers were accumulated from reviewing literature and expert feedback, which were then analyzed by the F-DEMATEL. The findings revealed that ‘E-waste management policy’, ‘Digitalization’, and ‘Awareness towards e-waste management’ are the three most prominent drivers of e-waste management. The derived cause-effect relations among the drivers show ‘Awareness towards e-waste management’ to be the most causative and ‘Implementing Circular Economy’ to be the least causative driver. The outcomes of this study are expected to help developing nations in implementing effective e-waste management to achieve social, environmental, and economic sustainability, thus achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs).