Remanufactured products offer better environmental benefits, and governments encourage manufacturers to remanufacture through various subsidy policies. This practice has shown that, in addition to product sales, remanufactured product can also achieve its value through social donation. Based on the remanufactured product value realization approaches, governments provide two kinds of incentive policies, which are remanufactured product sales subsidies and remanufactured product donation subsidies. This paper constructs a two-stage Stackelberg game model including a government and a manufacturer under two different policies, which can be solved by backward induction. By comparing the optimal decision of the two policies, our results show that, compared with the remanufacturing sales subsidy, donation subsidy weakens the cannibalization of remanufactured products for new products and increases the quantity of new products. It reduces the sales quantity of remanufactured products, but increases their total quantity. Under certain conditions of low subsidy, the manufacturer adopting sales subsidy provides better economic and environmental benefits. Under certain conditions of high subsidy, the manufacturer adopting donation subsidy offers better economic and environmental benefits. When untreated product environmental impact is large enough, donation subsidy policy has a better social welfare. Otherwise, the choice of social welfare of these two different policies depends on the social impact of remanufactured product donated.

In many developing countries, the existence of the uncertified recycler seriously hinders the healthy development of the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE or e-waste) recycling industry. As a result, how the government can regulate the uncertified recycler to improve environment and public health during the recycling processes has become a critical issue. To help tackle this issue, we build an evolutionary game model to study the interactions between the government and the uncertified recycler. We conduct stability analysis of each participant and obtain four asymptotically stable states. Furthermore, we conduct numerical simulations for comparative analysis based on the current situation of the Chinese e-waste recycling industry. Our results are as follows. First, there exist multiple asymptotically stable states for the government and the uncertified recycler, namely (no-governance, maintaining status quo), (governance, maintaining status quo), (governance, industrial upgrading), and (no-governance, industrial upgrading). Then, we verify the validity of the evolutionary game model through numerical simulations and find that penalty, supervision cost, additional investment cost, and financial subsidy can significantly influence the behavioral strategy of the government and the uncertified recycler. Finally, we find that the government should adopt the reward-penalty-supervision mechanism to promote the healthy development of the e-waste recycling industry and protect the environment and public health. Specifically, first, the government’s subsidy for the uncertified recycler has upper and lower limits. Exceeding the upper limit will result in an excessive financial burden to the government, while falling below the lower limit will hinder the uncertified recycler from technology upgrading. Second, the government should strengthen the supervision of the uncertified recycler and increase the punishment for violations. Third, the government should focus on controlling the supervision cost. Fourth, according to the asymptotically stable state (no-governance, industrial upgrading), the government should prepare to withdraw from the market when the uncertified recycler chooses industrial upgrading.

Facing a growing amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), a recent recast of the WEEE directive has put a specific reuse target for manufacturers, aiming to reduce environmental pollution and incentivize a green product design. In this paper, in order to examine whether the above two goals can be achieved by setting a specific reuse target, we have modelled a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a supplier (the leader) and a manufacturer (the follower) with the constraint of a mandated remanufacturing target. In this model, the supplier determines the level of interchangeability in product design and the wholesale price of the key component. The manufacturer buys the key components from the supplier and makes production and remanufacturing decisions under the requirement of a mandated remanufacturing target. We have investigated the supply chain’s members’ optimal decisions and analyzed the impact of the mandated remanufacturing target on the optimal profits of the supply chain’s members and consumer surplus, and finally, we have explored the environmental implications of the mandated remanufacturing target. We found that the supply chain’s members’ optimal decisions are affected by the mandated remanufacturing target and the cost of the new component. In terms of the economic implications of the mandated remanufacturing target, we have demonstrated that the increase in the mandated remanufacturing target has negative effects on the profits of the supply chain’s members and consumer surplus. Regarding the goal of incentivizing green product design, we found that the mandated remanufacturing target cannot always incentivize the supplier to implement product design that is beneficial to remanufacturing. From the perspective of the environment, we further indicate that more stringent mandated remanufacturing targets may bring an undesirable environmental outcome.

Although remanufacturing has great economic and environmental potential, internal cannibalization, and lack of consumer acceptance of remanufactured products prevent original equipment manufacturer (OEM) from realizing the full potential value through remanufacturing. Practices show that remanufactured products can realize their value by the donation, besides resale. Thus, this paper incorporates the donation of remanufactured products with government subsidy and presents an upgraded remanufacturing strategy to expand the demand for remanufactured products and weaken the internal cannibalization of remanufactured products. We respectively construct the two-period game model with and without upgraded remanufacturing and explore the effect of upgraded remanufacturing on production decision, economic and environmental benefits. The main conclusions are as follows. The donation subsidy is negatively related with the sale quantity of remanufactured products, but is positively related with the donation quantity of remanufactured products and the quantity of new products. The donation subsidy expands the demand for remanufactured products and weakens internal cannibalization of remanufactured products. Whether the upgraded remanufacturing strategy is profitable depends on the fixed cost of the remanufacturing. When consumers consider remanufactured products environmentally friendly, the government can realize an OEM’s win-win situation where the economic and environmental benefits get improved by adjusting the donation subsidy. Otherwise, introducing upgraded remanufacturing makes the environment worse. Comparatively speaking, a low-cost and environmentally friendly manufacturer is relatively easier to achieve the win-win situation through donation subsidy.