Manufacturer's cooperative recycling strategies considering the negative externality of unrecycled products: Non-cooperative, fund-cooperative, or labour-cooperative

This paper proposes a new objective function for manufacturer considering the negative externality of unrecycled products (NEUP), and develops three cooperative recycling modes: non-cooperative, fund-cooperative and labour-cooperative. Results indicate that compared to non-cooperative, while fund-cooperative can enhance the recycling rate, it hurts the system's profitability. In contrast, labour-cooperative can achieve a win–win situation for both. Moreover, considering NEUP expands the dominant space of fund-cooperative in recycling rate, but weakens its advantage in market demand. Notably, considering NEUP may render cooperative recycling ineffective in improving profit, which largely depends on the degree of considering NEUP and recycling cost coefficient ratio.