Technological advancement and rapid demand changes, lead to shorter life period and booming waste of electronic products. Recycling and reusing activities of electronic products has attracted much attention on the optimization of green supply chain (SC). This study employs system dynamics (SD) model to explore the effect of single strategy and combined scenarios on mitigating inventory amplification, i.e., bullwhip effect (BE) in three-echelon SC. Novel scenario simulation is designed to stimulate recovery activities of electronic waste, decrease solid material depletion and promote clean production. Main thread is as follows: establishing SD model in line with practical operation mechanism, testing the robustness of model, emulating the effect of single strategy and combined scenarios on mitigating BE and finally proposing optimal strategies on the optimization of green SC. Results show that positive recovery activities is an optimal solution in green SC among single strategies; simulated scenarios alleviate the BE largely especially the combination of higher recovery ratio and information transparency reinforcement. Initially, the emulated-mapping of this field helps graphically illustrate the potential optimizeddirections and stimulate individual recovery behaviors in green SC.

Introduction

Green SC background

The successful integration of economic, environmental and social sustainability goals in green SC, has pushed green SC to be the forethought of leading supply chain and operation management. Implementing green SC becomes a strategic task of industrial development worldwide (Turrisi et al., 2013). Facing governmental regulations and green trade barriers, if enterprises want to win sustainable competitive advantage, a long-term choice is to take social-economic-environmental responsibility and provide green products (Pan et al., 2015). Issued by China’s SEPA (State Environmental Protection Administration) in 2007, environmental pollution regulation of electronic products refers to information technology products, communication products, office equipment, such as computer, printer, photocopier, telephone. Electronic waste refers to disused electronic products, electronic appliances, electronic equipment and its used parts and components, including daily-disused computer, phone etc. While rapid upgrading of electronic products has brought a substantial growth of electronic waste. According to a statistical report on electronic waste by European Union (EU) in 2011, electronic waste was surging at a rate of 16%e28% per 5 years, 3 times faster than total solid waste. Electronic waste grows fastest among all the solid waste. The cyclic utilization of electronic waste has aroused the attention in the field of green SC worldwide. China, as the manufacture and consumption superpower, is confronted with inappropriate disposal and serious pollution of electronic waste. Derived from Academy of Social Sciences, electronic products in Beijing has approached a fastigium, with electronic waste rising to 15.83 million tons million tons (Abhishek and Jinhui, 2017). In views of the incapability of natural degradation of electronic products, overdue recovery processing particularly immediate landfill or combustion, surely incurs severe contamination (Carlsson and Fuller, 2000). In China, electronic waste is mainly disposed by three ways, namely refurbishment to secondary market, simple disassembly as parts manufacturing and dumping. This * Corresponding author. disordered reverse logistic system of China brings a great waste of resources and heavy environmental pollution. Otherwise, electronic waste could be used as industrial product materials to generate social-economic-environmental value through adopting progressive technology.