Environmental Sustainability By Recycling of PET Plastic Bottles And Reusing Them In Textile Industry: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Abstract This study considers a sustainable supply chain including the collector, cleaner, and recycler for recycling of PET plastic bottles and reusing them in textile industry. In the market, some suppliers of textile industry purchase cleaned and non-fragmented bottles and then they fragment them, whereas others prefer to buy recycled materials (i.e., cleaned and fragmented bottles). The collector collects used plastic bottles. To meet demand of the recycled materials, the collector transfers a portion of the collected bottles to the recycler and then the recycler cleans and fragments them. Furthermore, the collector cleans another portion of the collected bottles himself or via a cleaner to meet demand of the cleaned and non-fragmented bottles. In this setting, two different structures are established for transferring the cleaned bottles to suppliers. Under the first structure, the collector cleans the collected bottles through the cleaner by giving a share of the profit to him, while he is equipped with the bottles cleaning technology by paying a setup cost under the second structure. Moreover, the game-theoretic models are developed including Nash, Stackelberg, and Centralized to make decisions under two considered structures.