Electronic appliances can follow different pre-treatment processes once they reach their end-of-use phase. To ensure their best recovery, their design has to meet the needs of the operators that are going to treat them. Design for Recovery methods have been largely developed in scientific literature for the last two decades. However, they are not properly adapted to the requirements of the different operators since they do not take into account the diversity of pre-treatment practices nor the reasons that lead to carrying them out. This paper first presents a qualitative analysis which allowed us to create a model containing the parameters that influence the functioning of French WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) pre-treatment centres. Then multivariate statistical analysis has been used to define groupings of pre-treatment operators. Further work will focus on building the bridge between the identified groupings and ecodesign methodologies.