Recycling common materials: Effectiveness, optimal decisions, and coordination mechanisms

Hailong Cui and Greys Sošić

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 274, issue 3, 1055-1068

Abstract: A growing amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) is generated worldwide, and common materials (paper, plastic, metals, and glass), which account for more than half of MSW, exhibit low recovery rates. In this paper, we aim to investigate some key questions about recycling across three dimensions: greenhouse gas emissions, operational costs, and aggregate costs (social costs of emissions plus operational costs.) First, we build supply chain models for cradle-to-grave and cradle-to-cradle supply chains to derive an analytical condition for recycling effectiveness, and use US emissions and cost data to empirically validate that recycling is effective in reducing emissions for all the abovementioned materials. Furthermore, our analysis shows that recycling is effective for all materials, with the exception of glass, with respect to both operational and aggregate costs. Second, we study optimal recycling decisions in terms of collection and yield rates in a socially optimal case, as well as in scenarios in which recycling decisions are made by a local government, a product manufacturer, and an independent recycling firm. Unlike some of existing findings, we show that there are instances in which a product manufacturer or an independent firm might be the best choice for organizing recycling operations. Finally, we discuss and analyze incentives that a social planner should offer to recyclers to bring their efforts closer to the socially optimal choice. We obtain a novel result, which shows that a deposit/refund scheme implemented by a social planner with a refund to local governments might lead to a socially optimal collection rate.

Keywords: OR in environment and climate change; Green supply chains; Life-cycle analysis; Socially optimal recycling; Recycling rebates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221718309354
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:274:y:2019:i:3:p:1055-1068

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.11.010

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().