A Closed-Loop Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design with System Dynamics for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment

Abstract

Supply chain management covers the management of all activities starting from the supply of the raw material to the delivery of the final product to the end user. In the rapidly evolving and globalizing world, limited resources and increasing competitiveness are pushing both nations and organizations to make a difference in the context of supply chain management. The importance of the concept of the sustainability has become more widely recognized among nations and organizations recently. Recovery options are considered to be an economic gain by many companies. Moreover, pricing is no longer a unique competitive strategy since customers give today value and prefer environmentally friendly products. In other words, recovery options are considered by manufacturers due to customer demand, regulations, and economic return. This study puts forward a sustainable supply chain network design with a system dynamics model to minimize the waste of electric and electrical equipment, which is the one of the most crucial sectors in terms of waste management. This study contributes to filling the gap in the literature concerning the mathematical closed-loop reverse supply chain network design model from a system dynamics perspective rather than by using deterministic and static models proposed in the literature. The proposed model is visualized with the program AnyLogic. It constitutes a general framework with crucial variables of electrical and electric equipment supply chains. The results show the states of these variables by year, which can provide a decision-support system for policy making. The study ends by suggesting future directions and giving some helpful recommendations for other researchers on this topic.