A Study of Product Weight and Collection Rate in Closed-Loop Supply Chains With Recycling

In the context of closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs), we investigate two critical environmental factors of the product weight and the collection rate, as well as their environmental consequence of the landfill quantity. There are three closely related CLSC models consisting of a manufacturer who also recycles used products and a collector of the used products. The first CLSC is a centralized model with the vertical integration of the manufacturer and the collector. The second CLSC is a decentralized model with the manufacturer as the leader and the collector as the follower in a Stackelberg game. The third CLSC is a decentralized model with government subsidy and fee. In addition, we formulate a nonrecycling model as a benchmark for comparison. Under this modeling framework, this paper shows the impacts of supply chain centralization/decentralization as well as government subsidy and fee on these two factors and their environmental consequence in terms of the disposal quantity at landfills. Throughout the paper, numerous managerial insights and policy implications are provided.