SUMMARY

Electronic waste is a growing concern in the world among governments, businesses, and consumers, representing economic, social, and environmental challenges. To deal with these growing challenges a strong response is needed. Despite this apparent need, compared to the rapid increases in electronic technology that make it faster, more available, and more affordable, the technology to process electronic waste has not kept pace. This fact alone shows the lack of attention given to the problem. Though it also points to an opportunity to build an efficient system to deal with the problem using what is already known about the lifecycle of electronic devices. Therefore, the goal of this work is to create a modeling tool to help stakeholders in the lifecycle of electronic devices understand the consequences of their choices as they affect the use of material and energy resources. To focus the research LCD computer monitors are chosen as a case study. As a corollary to this modeling effort, the systems modeling language SysML and ParaMagic will be evaluated. SysML was designed with Model Based Systems Engineering principles in mind thus it seems that it is a natural fit to the problem domain. Furthermore, testing SysML will provide insight into the advantages and disadvantages of the new language. The findings with respect to LCD computer monitors show that increasing the number of end of life options and the amount of monitors flowing into those options could result in network wide material and energy savings. The findings with respect to SysML and ParaMagic are mixed. Although SysML provides tremendous modeling freedom, this freedom can result in increased upfront costs for developing executable models. Similarly, ParaMagic was found to be an effective tool for creating small executable models, but as the size of models increase its effectiveness tends to zero.