Resource recycle efficiency improvement analysis for sharing bicycles: Value chain perspective

Abstract

Sharing economy represents a new business model in which the access to goods, services, spaces, and other assets can be shared or obtained. Sharing economy firms have been able to achieve global levels of success at an unprecedented space. It is acknowledged by the public and enterprises due to intensive utilization of resources. In order to help enterprises understand and clarify the resources efficiency improvement mechanism of environmental impact during the promotion of the sharing economy model in operation, this paper explores the evolutionary history and value chain of different bicycle consumption pattern, then employs a queuing theory to discuss the feasibility of the sharing bicycle company recycle system from the perspective of value chain and analyzes the approach to improve the efficiency of recycling system. It creates a model against current traditional recycling mechanism which contains production, consumption and recycling process with a queuing theory as a base. Related cost and benefit calculation are analyzed based on an example simulation, an empirical application in two sharing bicycle companies are discussed as well. Result shows that, if the ration of operating cost of each recycle station and the average reduction cost each bicycle recycle can meet a range between the average number of bicycles in recycle station and the average number of bicycles waiting to be recycled, the sharing bicycle resource recycle efficiency can be improved, accordingly, it can not only alleviate the urban environmental problems as it allows idle assets to gain more usage but also generate more frequent economic activity, the bicycle companies have a value adding in sharing bicycle operation from the efficiency improvement. The comparison between two major sharing bicycle enterprises (OFO and Mobike) with two different schemes in China indicates that the model with self-source of damaged bicycles recycling are more beneficial than the model with the public help of the damaged bicycles recycling.