Spin the Bottle Bill

This project is a collaboration with Austin Saragih, Prof. Saurabh Amin, and Prof. Jan C. Fransoo. It is aimed at maximizing the recycling rate in deposit-refund systems for beverage containers, applied to a case study in California. We model the problem under the decision variables of container redemption value (CRV), value of manufacturer fee for producing a beverage container, and distance to recycling centers. We find that the current CRV of 5 cents for containers less than 24 ounces maximizes the unredeemed deposit and therefore the revenue of such systems, but not the recycling rate.

I worked as a research assistant mainly contributing to the NP-hardness proof of the second-level supply chain design problem, the convexity and monotonicity analyses for global optimality, and the case study in California.

The preprint is available here.