The Portuguese directive 230/2004 established December 2006 as the dead-line for the legal targets of EEE recovery to be achieved. The EEE producers working in Portugal set up an organization whose mission is to design and manage this recovery network. A MILP model was previously developed to optimize the network design where, by considering EEE sources and recycling facilities locations as known, sorting centre locations were determined together with the planning of collection and sorting activities. In the present paper, the network planned by the Portuguese EEE organization is compared with the results provided by this early model. In addition, and taking into account new organizational objectives, where collecting and sorting entities should independently perform the associated activities, the developed model is further extended, in order to account for a new network level related to the collection and sorting activities, and the previous network is retrofitted.

Thyreophoran dinosaurs have spike- and club-shaped osteoderms probably used for defensive weapons. The structural and histological variations have been little known. Here, we provide the comparisons of the internal structures in defensive weapons of ankylosaurs and stegosaurs, using spikes of a polacanthid (Gastonia) and a nodosaurid (Edmontonia), clubs of ankylosaurids (Saichania and Ankylosauridae indet. from Canada), and spikes of stegosaurids (Stegosaurus and Dacentrurus), which sheds light on understandings of evolutionary history and functional implications of defensive weapons in thyreophorans. In ankylosaurs, the structural and histological features of spikes and clubs are similar with those of small osteoderms in having thin compact bones, thick cancellous bones with large vascular canals, and abundant collagen fibers. A previous study demonstrated that each of three groups of ankylosaurs (polacanthid, nodosaurid, and ankylosaurid) has distinct characteristic arrangements of collagen fibers in small osteoderms. This study shows that spikes and clubs of ankylosaurs maintain the same characteristic features for each group despite of the differences in shapes and sizes. Conversely, the spike-shaped osteoderms in primitive (Dacentrurus) and derived (Stegosaurus) stegosaurids have similar structure to each other and are significantly different from the other types of stegosaur osteoderms (throat bony ossicles and plates) in having thick compact bones with a medullary cavity. These lack abundant collagen fibers unlike ankylosaur osteoderms. The spikes of ankylosaurs and stegosaurs are similar in shape, but their structural and histological features are different in having unique structures of collagen fibers for ankylosaurs and thick compact bones for stegosaurs, providing enough strength to have large spikes and to use them as defensive weapons. Although the shapes of ankylosaur clubs are different from spikes, the internal structures are similar, suggesting that ankylosaurs maintain similar structures despite of different shapes in osteoderms. These results indicate that ankylosaurs and stegosaurs used different strategies independently to evolve defensive weapons.

An European directive established that all EU countries must have, until the end of 2006, a recovery network for the electric and electronic equipment waste (WEEE). In Portugal, a group of producers formed a non-profit organization to design and manage this waste now. In this work, a model developed previously by the authors to design and plan a generic WEEE network is presented and applied to the Portuguese case. The results obtained are discussed and compared with the network that is currently operating.