Responsibility disengagement or sharing? Cooperative fulfilling mechanism of solid waste management in the remanufacturing supply chain.

Due to limited resources and meager profits, collectors have insufficient motivation to fulfill their responsibilities, resulting in severe secondary pollution in the recycling process. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on the interests of collectors to motivate them to fulfill their solid waste management (SWM) responsibilities better. This paper focuses on remanufacturers' altruistic behavior in the context of collectors' compliance. Based on the Stackelberg game method, this paper constructs decision-making models for remanufacturers concerned or not concerned about the interests of collectors and compares the optimal decision-making outcomes of each model. The study finds that (1) based on remanufacturers' altruistic concerns, a coordination mechanism for sharing responsibility-fulfilling costs for collectors can motivate them to fulfill their responsibilities and improve the performance of the remanufacturing supply chain. (2) The proportion of the remanufacturer's share of the responsibility cost for the collector should not be too low, which is not conducive to encouraging the collector to fulfill the responsibility. However, the sharing proportion should not be too high, as this will increase the burden on the remanufacturer. This paper demonstrates the applicability of remanufacturers to moderately share responsibility costs for collectors to incentivize collectors to fulfill their responsibilities. The findings bridge the gap in research on SWM in remanufacturing supply chains. The management insights from this paper are expected to help remanufacturing supply chain companies establish a reuse behavior model that addresses the challenges that SWM faces to improve remanufacturing supply chain performance.