Strategy analysis of the producer considering product design and collection effort under take-back legislation

Abstract

To reduce the environmental pollution of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), the government has promulgated take-back legislation. For the producer, he should consider collection effort and remanufacturing design response to collection goal and remanufacturing goal. In this article, we develop two models: (1) model only with remanufacturing design and (2) model with both collection effort and remanufacturing design. First, we study how the producer chooses the optimal strategy based on the parameters of the product design and collection effort in the two models. By comparing the two models, the main conclusions are as follows: (i) we obtain the impact of collection effort on government legislation; (ii) the quantities of new product, remanufactured product, collection amount, remanufacturing design level, collection effort level, profit of the producer, and environmental impact increase as a result of collection effort investment; and (iii) when the economic value of unit environmental impact is low, the social welfare in the case with collection effort investment is higher than that without collection effort investment.

Keywords:

• Remanufacturing
• take-back legislation
• product design
• collection effort

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions to improve the quality of the paper significantly. The work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada discovery grant (Grant No. RGPIN-2014-03594, RGPIN-2019-07115), the National Natural Science Foundation, China10.13039/501100001809 (Project nos. 71771138 and 71702087), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Project nos. NP2016303 and NS2017057), Funding of Jiangsu Innovation Program for Graduate Education (Project no. KYCX18_0236), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, short-term program for Ph.D. (Grant No. 180611DF09), Special Foundation for Taishan Scholars of Shandong Province, China (Grant No. tsqn201812061), and Science and Technology Research Program for Higher Education of Shandong Province, China (Grant No. 2019KJI006).