Recycling Channel Selection for a Manufacturer Involving Consumers' Green-Return Behavior

Consumers' green-return behavior (CGRB) plays an increasingly crucial role in sustaining the environments in practice. Little, however, is known about its impact on manufacturer's recycling decisions, such as recycling channel selection and recycling price. To contribute to practice and the literature, this study examines how a manufacturer makes recycling decisions considering CGRB. More specifically, we develop a recycling quantity function to reveal the dependence of recycling quantities on CGRB and model the manufacturer's recycling decision making in a self-recycling channel and a third-party recycling channel. We analyze the economic and environmental performances of the two recycling channels and obtain interesting results and important managerial implications. The side payment of recycling and the salvage value of used products are important factors for the manufacturer to determine whether to perform or not product recycling and further select recycling channels. Additionally, affected by CGRB, their specific values change the manufacturer's recycling strategies. Moreover, with the weakening of CGRB, the manufacturer prefers to choose the third-party recycling channel. At last, we find that neither recycling channel presents overwhelming superiority over the other in environmental performance when involving CGRB.