Analysis of a pharmaceutical reverse supply chain based on unwanted medications categories in household

Improper disposal of unwanted medications can be very costly and harmful to the environment and people's health. To facilitate safe disposal and remove excessive household storage of medicines, this paper proposes an integrated reverse supply chain (RSC) model with a pharmaceutical company, a recycler, retailers, customers and government. We investigates the impact of different categories of unwanted medications and government's subsidy, penalty and publicity investment on the RSC profit and the collection rate of expired medications. The numerical results show that with the growth of the percentage of unexpired medications, the collection rate of expired medications remains unchanged, whereas the profit of entire RSC increases. Governments' regulations and supervision have a crucial influence on the decision-making of pharmaceutical RSC. There exists a trade-off between government's subsidies, penalties and publicity investment to collect expired medications.