Barriers of a closed-loop cartridge remanufacturing supply chain for urban waste recovery governance in China

Abstract

Abstract Most of big cities in China have struggled to deal with the issue of Garbage siege . Conversely, garbage like e-wastes can be a City Mine with the high recovery value. As one of the main recovery methods, remanufacturing can make a significant contribution to urban waste governance. However, uncertain supply of e-wastes and low demand of remanufactured products hamper the remanufacturing development. Thus, this paper aims to introduce a new closed-loop supply chain mode. We hypothesize that barriers for such a mode exist for the whole supply chain from the remanufacturers’ management and government support. Focusing on one of the most important components of e-wastes, used cartridges, we first develop a closed-loop remanufacturing supply chain mode and identify barriers along three supply chain stages (collection of used cartridges, remanufacturing, and sales & use of remanufactured cartridges) at both the government and enterprise levels. Then, using evaluation by four experts from two typical remanufacturers, we apply the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory method to analyze the causal relationships among the barriers. Different from some previous studies that reveal collecting of used cartridges is the key difficulty and the government plays the crucial role, our results show that the most important barriers are at the remanufacturing and sales stages while the elemental barriers are remanufacturers. Three of four barriers that need to be urgently dealt with are at the government level, they are, lack of national quality standards for remanufactured printing consumables, lack of a certification system for remanufactured printing consumables, and lack of technical standards for remanufacturing of printing consumables. The one urgent barrier at the enterprise level is reputation damage of remanufacturers by low quality of fake and counterfeit printing consumables. Two elemental barriers are both at the enterprise level, they are, restrictions for use of remanufactured cartridges by original manufacturers of new cartridges, and lack of self-owned intellectual property and innovative technology patents.