Overcoming the extended producer responsibility challenges of packaging material through integrated refurbishing and recycling

Abstract

This paper proposes a model to integrate the refurbishing and recycling activities with the forward supply chain aiming to overcome the recent challenges faced by the organizations while implementing extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations. The proposed model is easy to use, and the decision-makers can visualize the effects of their decisions on economic health of the organization to fulfil the growing needs of environmental conservation and social obligations by trading-off the number, location, and capacity of the recycling, refurbishing, collection, and disposal centers. The proposed model has been validated in a process industry (paint production). The results of the case organization suggest that integrating the refurbishing and recycling of the paint packaging is not only economically beneficial to the organization but is also environment friendly and helps to create jobs for low-skilled labor. Two novelties of the research work are the following: (i) the proposed model has been developed to handle carbon footprints generated in the recycling, refurbishing, and disposal processes as well as transportation, and (ii) the ε-constraint and LP-metric methods have been used to generate a set of Pareto-optimal solutions unlike single optimal solution. These Pareto-optimal solutions provide the flexibility to the organization to pick up optimal solutions with different environmental, social, and economic requirements to provide the government agencies data for EPR obligations.