Recycling and extending product-life: an evolutionary modelling

This paper presents a model-based analysis of firms’ economic incentives to extend product life and market recyclable products. We address this problem by developing an evolutionary simulation model to describe the behavior of business firms as interacting with consumers and recyclers. Market structure, business firms’ R&D strategies and consumers’ preferences are found to have an important influence here. The simulation results show that improvement in recycling is necessary but not sufficient to solve the issue of increase in waste. Recycling will need to be backed up with an extension in product-life to face such an unwanted increase. Adopting such a strategy could be positive for firms and for the environment because it could lead to high economic performance, both in terms of profits and market share, and to high environmental performance, both in terms of product recyclability and product lifetime. Our results suggest introducing regulation policies aimed at encouraging firms to invest in developing green products, i.e. those which are easily recyclable and which have a long lifetime, and getting consumers to buy them. It would also seem crucial to lend support to innovation outlay for such firms and to favor their seeking to improve product performance.

Eric BrouillatEmail: