Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has become one of the fastest growing waste streams around the world, putting tremendous pressure on the environment, resources, and public health. A practically driven question about how to promote the development of the WEEE recycling industry plagues many countries, especially in developing economies such as China. This study uses an expert decision-making system based on the fuzzy Delphi technique and improved Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method to identify the critical barriers and their cause–effect relationships in the Chinese WEEE recycling industry. First, using the fuzzy Delphi technique, we find that nine barriers significantly impact the development of the Chinese WEEE recycling industry. Then, three critical barriers which include the implementation of policies and regulations, qualified disassembly, and unqualified disassembly are identified by employing the improved DEMATEL method. Furthermore, implementation of policies and regulations belong to the cause group, and the other two barriers belong to the effect group. Finally, some practical implications are proposed to promote the sustainable development of the Chinese WEEE recycling industry. To be specific, the Chinese government should optimize the implementation details of the e-waste take-back legislation, establish a flexible reward–supervision–penalty mechanism to support the formal collector, and improve the collection efficiency. The results of this paper are of value to firms that participate in WEEE recycling and to the government that aims to promote the sustainable development of the WEEE recycling industry.

As the economy develops, the level of logistics required means many activities become increasingly dependent on transportation, which leads to the deterioration of the ecological environment, aggravates air pollution, causes urban traffic jams, and has a negative influence on sustainable development. Therefore, in the context of sustainable development, how to coordinate the development of the logistics industry and regional economy has become a governmental and academic focus. The coupling coordination degree model and spatial autocorrelation analysis model were applied to empirically analyze the coupling and coordination of the logistics industry and economy in each city in YRDR and the relationship of mutual influence. The research results show that, for economically developed cities, economic development had more influence on the coupled and coordinated degree of the two, and for the less developed cities, the development of logistics drove the improvement of the coupled and coordinated degree of the two. The analysis of the Anhui Province showed that the coupling and coordination degree of its own logistics industry and economy was driven by strong radiation, and the impact on that degree of the logistics industry and economy of cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai was not significant. The development of the coupling and coordination degree of the two variables of cities in Jiangsu Province was more balanced. The divergence degree of that of the logistics industry and economy of cities in Zhejiang Province exhibited a tendency to increase, and the divergence mainly came from the endogenous development of each city. The variability was mainly due to the endogenous dynamics of each city’s development. Finally, suggestions for the coordinated and sustainable development of the logistics industry and regional economy are provided.

As an effective approach to reduce resource waste and production costs, remanufacturing has elicited extensive attention from the industry and academia. Many electronic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have increasingly begun to incorporate product eco-design (PED) into their remanufacturing processes since take-back regulations that hold OEMs responsible for handling their own end-of-life products have gradually become more stringent. The investment costs for the PED implementation vary across different PED effort levels (i.e., high, medium, and low) chosen by the OEM, and different PED effort levels may yield different remanufacturing strategies. In this paper, we develop a stylized game-theoretic model to investigate the impact of PED effort levels on the OEM’s equilibrium decisions (which include production quantities of new and remanufactured products) and supply chain performance in the context of take-back legislation. Our results demonstrate that high PED effort levels do not imply more remanufacturing and that the OEM’s choice of remanufacturing strategies depends on the trade-off between cost savings from remanufacturing and deterministic risks. Interestingly, we find that new products should have a certain level of profitability to ensure the validity of take-back legislation. Due to the substitution and complementary effects between new and remanufactured products, the optimal decisions exhibit different characteristics in remanufacturing strategies. Through a numerical study, we observe that the economic performance decreases with increases in the PED effort level under take-back legislation, but the change in the total environmental impact depends on the PED effort level and the production cost of new products.