Extended Producer Responsibility: Waste Hierarchy Flow Simulator

Policy Controls

EPR fee rate 0.80 $/kg

Producer eco-design score 0.50

Collection rate 85%

Decision temperature T 0.60

Waste Hierarchy Split

Live Readouts

Landfill diversion

Circularity index

EPR revenue

Items routed

How it works

Each unit of end-of-life product first faces a collection roll: with probability equal to the collection rate it enters the formal system; otherwise it leaks out as uncollected litter. Collected units then choose a route down the waste hierarchy — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover (energy) or Landfill — using a multinomial logit (discrete choice) model, the same class of model economists use to predict real waste-management behaviour:

effective_cost(i) = base_cost(i) − design·designBonus(i)
                    + fee·feePenalty(i) − fee·subsidyCredit(i)

P(route i) = exp(−cost(i) / T) / Σⱼ exp(−cost(j) / T)

The EPR fee is charged on the routes that externalise the most cost onto the environment (Landfill, Recover) and its revenue funds a subsidy that lowers the effective cost of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle — pushing probability mass up the hierarchy. The eco-design score represents how repairable/recyclable the producer made the product; it directly cuts the base cost of Reuse and Recycle. The temperature T controls how rationally the system behaves: low T sends almost all flow to the cheapest route, high T spreads it out more randomly, modelling imperfect real-world sorting and consumer behaviour.

Landfill diversion — share of collected mass that avoids landfill entirely.
Circularity index — a weighted score (Reduce 1.0, Reuse 0.8, Recycle 0.6, Recover 0.2, Landfill 0) showing how far up the hierarchy the flow sits.
EPR revenue — cumulative fee collected on Landfill + Recover mass, the pool that funds the subsidy.

Real-world relevance: this logit-routing mechanism mirrors how EU Extended Producer Responsibility schemes and eco-modulated fees (France's éco-contribution, Germany's Verpackungsgesetz) are designed to shift material flow away from disposal without banning it outright.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Recover Landfill

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