This study redesigns the supply chain of agricultural products in southwest China under the Belt and Road Initiative to improve its eco-efficiency by considering the associated agro-wastes flowing into bioenergy enterprise for energy production. Two scenarios are created, in which the first assumes that all waste flows into the enterprise, whereas the second only considers the inflow of agro-waste produced by farmers and the wholesale market. A system dynamics simulation is conducted by using carbon emissions per product as an indicator to obtain the optimal scenario for managerial practice and design an incentivizing mechanism to drive supply chain operations. A case study is provided to demonstrate application of the system dynamics. Finally, the limitations of the study are discussed to lay the foundation for further improvement.

Innovation capability of enterprises will greatly influence the current and future development of companies. This paper investigates the relationship between customer concentration and innovation capability of enterprises through the view of both the financing constraints and the expectation of managers. Based on the data of China’s A-share listed companies over the period from 2012 to 2016, several methods including system GMM, threshold model of fixed effects, and PSM are applied for empirical analysis. The results show that the innovation capability of listed companies in China are negatively correlated with the customer concentration. Higher customer concentration brings about stronger constraints from large customers on enterprises and greater dependence of enterprises on large customers, which result in weaker demand for innovation and lower investment in innovation. Meanwhile, the results demonstrate the double-threshold effect of financing constraints. The effect of customer concentration on innovation can be different in companies with low, medium, or high-financing constraints. Furthermore, optimistic expectations are more conducive to the reduction of customer concentration and the improvement of innovation. In addition, based on the perspective of the manager’s expectation, the research demonstrates the heterogeneous impact of manager’s expectation on the relationship between customer concentration and innovation capability.

Confronting the dual challenges of excessive resource consumption and environmental pollution, the traditional extensive economic development pattern significantly impeded the high-quality development of the Chinese economy. Examining variations in green total factor productivity across different types of cities holds substantial practical significance for promoting coordinated regional development and facilitating the green transformation of urban economies. Panel data from 283 cities in China spanning the years 2006 to 2020 were selected for analysis. The window-Malmquist–Luenberger index model, incorporating a mixed distance function, was employed to assess changes in green total factor productivity among the sample cities. The results were then categorized and analyzed based on different city attributes. The findings indicate that (1) the variation in green total factor productivity across China’s four major regions from 2006 to 2020 is generally characterized by an initial decline followed by an increase; (2) the proportion of cities with significantly improved green total factor productivity decreases from the east to the central, western, and northeastern regions; (3) the increase in green total factor productivity is positively correlated with city size, suggesting that larger cities experience higher growth in green total factor productivity; (4) first- and second-tier cities exhibit a relatively high mean value of green total factor productivity growth, while third-, fourth-, and fifth-tier cities demonstrate relatively lower growth.

This paper proposes a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach, coupling intervalued trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy number (IVTIFN) with the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to facilitate the selection of pipe materials. Their integration can maximize the advantage in better expressing decision maker’s preference on the proposed evaluation criteria by using a bounded limit instead of an exact value, to rank material alternatives based upon their functional, economic and environmental attributes. To reduce possible information overlapping resulted from the criteria, Mahalanobis distance is incorporated into IVTIFN–TOPSIS to improve the selection results. An illustrative example is provided to verify the proposed approach and demonstrate its practical application, in which four common alternative materials, including carbon steel, galvanized steel, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and high-density polyethylenes (HDPE), are subject to precise selection to determine their adaptability in waste-water piping. The selection result indicates that the plastic materials are superior to the metal materials. In particular, HDPE is the optimal material alternative for waste-water collection and transport.

“Gutter oil” is a term for the practice of recycling used waste oil from restaurant fryers, sinks, and even slaughterhouses and sewers, and has been a major food safety and sanitation issue in China for many years. However, with proper treatment, these issues can be mitigated, turning large amounts of waste product into valuable resources and conserving energy resources. Based on this questionnaire survey conducted in the cities of Chengdu and Mianyang in Sichuan, China, this paper uses the value evaluation method to measure urban residents’ willingness to pay for the treatment of gutter oil, and explores the factors and path influencing residents’ willingness to pay based on the extended theory of planned behavior. The results of this study affirms the validity and universality of the Theory of Planned Behavior. Behavioral attitude, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms have a direct positive impact on their willingness to pay. Risk perception and past experience indirectly affect residents’ willingness to pay for gutter oil through the intermediary variable of behavioral attitude, which means that the public’s risk awareness can be improved by vigorously publicizing the harmful effects of gutter oil, thereby also increasing acceptance toward gutter oil treatment. As an intermediary variable, subjective norms have a significant indirect effect on the impact path of past experience on willingness to pay, which reflects the significant influence of subjective norms such as reference group and environment. The results show that urban residents have a higher willingness to pay for the treatment of gutter oil. The mean willingness to pay is 7.75 RMB per month per capita.