Haibo Chen

Promoting solid-waste resource recovery while reducing long-term reliance on public subsidies is a central challenge for zero-waste cities and the circular economy. This study examines mining-waste recycling in the context of China’s zero-waste city initiative by developing a tripartite evolutionary game involving the government, a supply chain platform, and recyclers and by treating supply chain finance transaction volume as an endogenous state variable that co-evolves with stakeholder strategies. Stability analysis and numerical simulations identify a dual-track flywheel mechanism in which transaction-volume feedback can support an efficient equilibrium through either a market-self-sufficient or a policy-supported regime. Market-driven self-sustainability is therefore treated as a conditional regime requiring both platform profitability and recycler-participation incentives to remain positive after direct subsidies and penalty instruments have been removed, while baseline oversight may continue. Under the tested parameterizations, concentrated early support may help the system cross a critical-mass region more effectively than prolonged weak intervention. Additional withdrawal stress tests show that both subsidy instruments can be removed after ignition while benchmark regulatory instruments remain; when subsidy and penalty instruments are removed together, persistence occurs only under the tested market self-sufficiency conditions. The results highlight the importance of policy timing, transaction records, and financing feedback in reducing policy dependence while sustaining recycler participation.

Under geopolitical conflicts, the deployment of emergency green energy in energy-import-dependent countries is constrained by limited upfront capital and uncertainty regarding the conflict duration. This study evaluates financial leasing as a policy instrument by combining a benchmark decision model under conventional procurement with a tripartite evolutionary game involving the energy demand side, financial leasing companies, and the government. The results show that conventional procurement creates an underinvestment-idle-capacity dilemma governed by the critical conflict-persistence probability. Financial leasing alleviates financial constraints and redistributes the risks associated with demand uncertainty, producing market-driven and policy-guided stable equilibria. A global grid search shows that the policy-guided basin expands as the conflict-persistence probability increases. However, government subsidies have an inverted-U-shaped effect because their effectiveness is jointly constrained by the demand-side participation condition and the government’s net-benefit condition. The numerical example shows that combining financial leasing with government subsidies reduces the critical conflict-persistence probability for adopting financial leasing from 0.286 to 0.127, a decrease of approximately 56%, and substantially relaxes the feasible upper bound of the risk-sharing coefficient. These findings provide a theoretical basis for the use of financial leasing as a policy instrument to enhance energy security in energy-import-dependent countries and for the design of complementary incentive mechanisms.

Against the background of the pandemic, the mask supply chain faces the risk of pollution caused by discarded masks, the risk of insufficient funds of retailers, and the risk of mask overstock. To better guard against the above risks, this study constructed a two-party game model and a cusp catastrophe model from the perspective of the mask green supply chain, and studied the strategic choices of retailers and suppliers in the supply chain affected by the risk of capital constraints and overstock. The result shows that the risk shocks will lead to the disruption of the mask green supply chain, and the main factors affecting the strategy choice of mask suppliers and retailers are mask recycling rate, deposit ratio, risk occurrence time, etc. In further research, this study involved a mechanism for financial institutions, mask retailers, and the government to jointly deal with the risk of mask overstock, the risk of retailers’ insufficient funds, and the risk of environmental pollution from discarded masks. The research path and conclusion of this study reveal the risks in the circulation area of mask supplies during the pandemic, and provide recommendations for planning for future crises and risk prevention.

The sustainability of the mask emergency supply chain faces two problems during the current COVID-19 pandemic. First, mask manufacturers are mainly small and mid-size enterprises, resulting in a lack of funds and credit lines for the introduction of equipment. Second, the periodicity and uncertainty of pandemics create overcapacity risk for the mask emergency supply chain. To solve these problems, this study incorporates financial leasing institutions and the government into the mask emergency supply chain. Based on a questionnaire survey of practitioners of financial leasing institutions, the relationship between mask manufacturers, financial leasing institutions, and the government in the mask supply chain is analyzed through a game model, and the behavior of mask manufacturers to reduce the scale of mask production after the occurrence of overcapacity is investigated using the cusp catastrophe theory. We find that in the case of masks’ overcapacity, mask manufacturers tend to continue production. Finally, we propose that financial leasing institutions should lease mask production equipment to mask manufacturers under the guarantee of the government and develop a mechanism for the three parties to jointly share the risk of mask overcapacity, aiming at ensuring the sustainable manufacturing of masks during the pandemic.