A Multi-Echelon Network Design in a Dual-Channel Reverse Supply Chain Considering Consumer Preference.

Peng Li,Di Wu

doi:10.3390/ijerph18094760

Abstract

The rapid development of e-commerce technologies has encouraged collection centers to adopt online recycling channels in addition to their existing traditional (offline) recycling channels, such the idea of coexisting traditional and online recycling channels evolved a new concept of a dual-channel reverse supply chain (DRSC). The adoption of DRSC will make the system lose stability and fall into the trap of complexity. Further the consumer-related factors, such as consumer preference, service level, have also severely affected the system efficiency of DRSC. Therefore, it is necessary to help DRSCs to design their networks for maintaining competitiveness and profitability. This paper focuses on the issues of quantitative modelling for the network design of a general multi-echelon, dual-objective DRSC system. By incorporating consumer preference for the online recycling channel into the system, we investigate a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to design the DRSC network with uncertainty and the model is solved using the ε-constraint method to derive optimal Pareto solutions. Numerical results show that there exist positive correlations between consumer preference and total collective quantity, online recycling price and the system profits. The proposed model and solution method could assist recyclers in pricing and service decisions to achieve a balance solution for economic and environmental sustainability.

Highlights

With the wave of industrialization sweeping the world, consumption of a wide variety of electronic products has grown globally, resulting in the mass of electronic waste (e-waste) is becoming the fastest growing waste flow in the world
This work contributes to the existing literature by formulating a stochastic mathematical model for the network design of a general dualchannel reverse supply chain (DRSC) system and, through the numerical analysis, we have explored the impact of consumer preference on the channel selection, pricing, and revenue of recycling practitioners in DRSC and its deeper management significance
We conduct example analysis aiming at the change of the index of consumer preference for the online recycling channel θ and service cost μ to the impact on collective quantity of e-waste in both channels and channel member’s profits and explore the causes and future countermeasures based on the analysis of data results and trends

Summary

Introduction

With the wave of industrialization sweeping the world, consumption of a wide variety of electronic products has grown globally, resulting in the mass of electronic waste (e-waste) is becoming the fastest growing waste flow in the world. Sustainable development, addressing economic benefits, and environment impacts, receives growing attention in the recycling industry of e-waste Facing this grim situation, many firms have started to adopt the practice of recovering potential value from e-waste and integrated recovery activities and environmental strategies into their recovery processes, such as HP, IBM, Apple, Kodak, and Lenovo [2]. Governments have introduced legislation to reduce the serious environmental pollution and this affects how firms take responsibility for the proper handling of their e-waste All these issues mean that researchers pay great attention to the reverse supply chain (RSC), which can be defined as the reverse flow of a series of facilities including product recovery, transportation, sorting, dismantling and remanufacturing for the purpose of taking back the e-waste and regaining product value

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