Design and simulation of a secondary resource recycling system: A case study of lead-acid batteries

The recycling of secondary resources is complicated as consumers, recyclers and governments are all involved in this process. In developing countries, compared to legal recyclers, illegal recyclers not only have cost advantages but also create serious pollution. Inappropriate management policies may cause disorder in the recycling market or inefficient fiscal management. This paper takes China's lead-acid batteries (LABs) from 2000 to 2015 as an example to construct a model of a secondary resource recovery system based on heterogeneous groups and analyzes the environmental and economic impacts of used LAB recycling. By simulating the implementation of different tax cuts, subsidies and regulatory policies by the government in each year, we observe the overall environmental impact of the recycling industry. This study finds that when the total amount of government expenditures is limited, the optimal policy combination emphasizes tax reduction and subsidy policies during the growth period of the recycling industry and uses more funds for supervision in the mature period. Under the balance of fiscal revenues and expenditures, the optimal policy combination can reduce the number of illegal recycling companies and waste lead emissions from the recycling market by 97.9% and 45.8%, respectively. Compared to research conducted using mathematical models and system dynamics models, this result is more in line with the actual situation, and the content is more intuitive. The government needs to adopt different policy combinations in different periods according to the state of the recycling market so that the recycling of secondary resources can achieve the optimal effect.