Flex’s plant in Sorocaba, Brazil developed a holistic ecosystem that uses Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to transform e-waste and reintroduce repurposed materials into the supply chain.

Flex implemented solutions to enable circular economy services and eco-efficient operations throughout Brazil. They included:

• A cloud-based collaborative reverse logistics system, which enabled multiplayer collaboration and reduced service time and costs
• A circular materials lab, which provided material input identification to ensure the right quality of output materials
• Automatic separation equipment for minimum contamination of material
• IoT-based collection bins to display the correct time to collect containers filled with e-waste
• A digital e-commerce platform, which helped to commercialize excess inventory and bring repaired and refurbished products to market
• A digital market platform for waste-enabling industrial symbiosis to increase material volumes and reduce material costs
• The company also implemented operational CO2-emission dashboards to provide visibility of environmental savings for its customers.

Flex’s Sorocaba factory was zero waste certified in 2018, with a 100% diversion rate.

The process for remanufactured plastic parts enabled savings of up to 82% on energy usage and a 74% reduction in GHG emissions. These technologies also achieved more than 44,000 tonnes of CO2 -equivalent credits. Over 90% of recovered material goes back into the supply chain (1,300 tons of recycled material used in new products, 11,000 tons of recycled industrial waste and 16,000 tons of post-consumer recycled e-waste), with a raw material (plastic) cost reduction of more than $3.2 million. Additionally, more than 180 direct and 300 indirect green jobs were generated.